Re: ProLine Question

[mdavis@crash.cts.com (Morgan Davis)]

In <1993May6.070329.846@lrc.edu> rheinze@lrc.edu writes:

>How do you send a single letter to multiple people
>on the ProLine board?
>MY friend wants to send the same letter to about 
>four of us on the internet.  How does it do it
>(other than upload it four times)?

There are two ways your friend can do this.  The first and easiest way
is to create a personal mailing list for use with the ProLine mail
program.  You only need to add a line into your mailrc file that
looks like this:

	friends = user@site, user@site, user@site, user@site

(In the ProLine mail program, just type $ to automatically invoke
your text editor on the mailrc file).

Now, to use this mailing list, address your message like this:

	To: $friends

The dollar sign tells the mail program to look up a list of addresses
that match the "friends" entry.  This shortcut effectively types in
the four addresses for you, as if you had used:

	To: user@site, user@site, user@site, user@site

Next, your friend need only transmit the text of the message (or grab it
from his or her user directory if it already resides on disk), then
send it off.  Four copies will be sent by the ProLine mailer for you,
so your friend need not duplicate this procedure more than once.


The second way to create a mailing list is to ask the ProLine administrator
to add an entry into the system's "aliases" database file.  This file
contains mail address aliases that can expand to many hundreds of
individual addresses (though that is not the most efficient way to reach
a lot of people -- newsgroups work better).  Regardless, the aliases
database is handy when you have more addresses than the mail program
can accomodate through personal address lists.  Sending a message to
a system mail alias involves addressing the letter to the alias (no
dollar sign is used).  The drawback to a system alias is that you, as
a user, do not have any access to manage or change the system's aliases
database.

Hope that answers your question.

--Morgan