🚀 go-pugleaf

The original poster told me that he was simply trying to get the
name of a user at a certain site.

This is a general problem that is hard to deal with.

One solution to this is to have people set up a simple reflector
called "userlist".  For sites that use sendmail-compatible aliases,
this is as simple as setting up a command that will generate a
reply containing a list of usernames and real name correspondences
for each person at that site.  To get a list of names of people
at a given site, I would mail to userlist at that site and wait
for a reply.

The problem with this solution is that it may be considered an
invansion of privacy.  Some people may not want to have others be
able to find their login name like this.  Also, it could lead to
someone starting a "junk mail" campaign.

A possible improvement on this would be to have the list contain
only those people who have asked to be placed on the list.  This
would be marginally successful, but my experience shows that most
people won't ask to be put on such a list unless the benefits are
obvious, and I mean obvious to a marketing or sales type, not an
engineer.

Another idea, which is actually pretty simple, is to build up a
set of names and addresses from the news.  If you go to
/usr/spool/news and execute the command

	find . -type f -exec grep '^From:' '{}' \; | sort -u

you'll get a pretty big list of logins and real names (as well
as some false ones).

A more accurate picture of who's out there could be kept by maintaining
a datestamped database and throwing out old entries.

-- 
David Elliott
dce@smsc.sony.com | ...!{uunet,mips}!sonyusa!dce
(408)944-4073
"It's bigger than a breadbox, and smaller than the planet Jupiter."