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ACADEMIC COMPUTING and COMMUNICATIONS CENTER | ||||||||
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Netids, Userids, Aliases, Oh My! | |||||
Not too long ago, we only had one machine at UIC for reading and sending email. Things were good. I was known only as my userid on CMS: U09046@UICVM (actually, U09046@UICVM.UIC.EDU as well). But people got tired of being known only by numbers, so we invented an email address that was built from their full name: mailnames, also known as "dot names." Now I was also known as Bob.Jackiewicz@uic.edu. My mailname was an "alias" for my real email address, but nobody had to worry about this because I only had one email address, and it was obvious where I wanted my email delivered. There was even a nifty way to set up your CMS session so your email was sent out with your mailname in the From: field.
Not long after we introduced mailnames, we started thinking about providing UNIX accounts to the UIC community. What would we use as login ids on the UNIX workstations? Mailnames are good for email addresses, but not much else. Most machines have a limit on the number of characters you can have in a login name; Bob.Jackiewicz was too long for most UNIXes. What we needed was a reasonably generic email address/login id which would work on any UNIX workstation and for any other online services we would provide. From this concept, the netid was born. Since all machines allow at least eight characters in their login ids, we chose eight to be the maximum length of the netids, and, to cover all bases for future services, we decided not to allow special characters such as the period or the hyphen. At first, the netid was used only to redirect email to a real computer account, wherever that account might be. (Just like mailnames.) So I became known as bobj@uic.edu, even though I didn't have an account on "uic.edu" with the login id "bobj". My mail, even the mail addressed to my mail alias bobj@uic.edu, was still delivered to U09046@UICVM.UIC.EDU. But now we also use netids as the login id for people's ADN UNIX accounts. Why have two names when one will do? In fact, we'll use the same netid for all ADN UNIX machines, to reduce confusion. I got an account on tigger, so I am now also known as bobj@tigger.cc.uic.edu. However, tigger itself has two names so I am bobj@tigger.uic.edu, too. (The same is true of icarus and UICVM.) Well, by now I was in a quandary. I had six email addresses which would all reach accounts belonging to me: bobj@uic.edu, bob.jackiewicz@uic.edu, U09046@UICVM.UIC.EDU, U09046@UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU, bobj@tigger.cc.uic.edu, and bobj@tigger.uic.edu. (Actually eight, since I also have an account on icarus, which gives me bobj@icarus.cc.uic.edu and bobj@icarus.uic.edu.) Whew! So which one should I use? Where should I tell people to send my email? Simple: bobj@uic.edu. That's the only public email address that I need. Think of it as my electronic pronoun. It's a lot nicer than Rufus.Xavier.Sarsaparilla, too. Even though it's possible for email addressed to any of the above email addresses to actually be delivered to the same account, these email addresses are by no means the same. Even bobj@tigger.cc.uic.edu and bobj@tigger.uic.edu are different, especially to programs such as Listserv. I personally read my mail on tigger, so I used phupdate to associate bobj@uic.edu with my bobj@tigger.cc.uic.edu account, and I use forwarding on other machines (UICVM and icarus) so that any email sent there will be redirected to my tigger account. (See How do I forward my email to my new email address?.) Most people aren't confused when I reply to the messages they sent to U09046@UICVM.UIC.EDU as bobj@uic.edu. (In fact, people usually prefer the netid -- it's a lot easier to recognize than a CMS userid.) However, some of your email will be processed by programs such as Listserv before it's ever read by humans. Listserv knows "you" by only one thing: your email address. It knows your email address because it appears in the From: header field in your messages. Other programs and people know you this way too. These programs have no way of knowing that bobj@tigger.cc.uic.edu and bobj@tigger.uic.edu is the same person. It is important to know what your From: field displays when seen by others. The simplest way to find out is to send yourself an email message and look at the From: field when you receive it. If it's yrnetid@uic.edu, then you're all set. Actually, it's fine, whatever it is, as long as you never change it. But that can be a problem sometimes, and that's why yrnetid@uic.edu is the preferred format for your email address - that email address is completely independent of any computer accounts you might have. Using it means that you can change where you read your mail, like moving from UICVM to tigger or icarus, without having to tell your electronic correspondents that you have moved. Your move shouldn't have to matter to them. Comments are welcome; send them to |
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| The ADN Connection, January/February 1997 | Previous: How do I migrate away from CMS mail? (to Eudora or Pine) | Next: Introducing the CSO |
| 1999-9-9 connect@uic.edu |
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