A nickname or alias is a shorthand notation for a known user's email-address, e.g. you might have a nickname "boss". The Address Book records more than just a user's nickname and full email-address: you can record here things like full name, home and work address and contact info, department, title, and general notes.
When you type in a nickname as addressee of a message, Eudora will translate this to the user's actual email-address upon sending the message out (so the SMTP server never sees the nickname).Unfortunately, this way it is easy to email the wrong person by mistake.
The default Eudora address book is called nndbase.txt and sits
right in your mail folder. This will be opened when you type Ctrl-L
or select "Tools > Address Book", and will be called "Eudora
Nicknames" within Eudora. You should use it to record personal contacts,
but for work purposes you may want to create an additional address book Work
by clicking "New Book" in the Address Book interface. This
will create Nickname\Work.txt and Nickname\Work.toc
under your mail folder. You can have as many books as you want, Eudora will
search for nicknames first in the default address book, then in all other ones
in alphabetic order.
You can use "File > Import" to bring in the Windows address books used by MS Outlook or Outlook Express (and I think also from Netscape/Mozilla). Eudora itself doesn't offer an export tool, but while the address book window is open, choosing "File > Save As" will save an HTML version of all address books you have. This same complete list also gets printed if you choose "Print" while in the address books.
Converting Eudora address books for use with yet other mail clients is possible, e.g. the ACCC address book conversion tool lets you convert to and from pine and Webmail formats and CSV (comma-separated value) format.
It is possible to have an address book shared by an entire department or workgroup, by putting it on a network drive accessible to all group members on an intranet, then editing your Eudora.ini file and including the following: ...
If you frequently need to mail the same group of people, but don't have a LISTSERV list set up for them (and can't do so for some reason), you can make a nickname pointing to the entire group. Simply create a new entry in your address book, but under "This nickname will expand to..." list all the email-addresses in the group, one on each line. You can also list existing nicknames in that list. Do enter a description of this private list/group in the full name box, e.g. "John Doe Friends and Family", which will cause Eudora to hide everyone's address from the recipients, and only show them the group/list name in the mail they receive. The descriptive name is also important so they know the message is from you and isn't spam.
"Tools > Directory Services" (Ctrl-Y) allows
you to look up other people's contact info via the finger, LDAP, and ph protocols.
At UIC, the online phonebook is available via the ph protocol,
so you'll have to select "ph" in the top box, then click
on "New Database" to set this up. Enter "UIC Nameserver"
or "UIC phonebook" as server name, and "ns.uic.edu"
as host name (server address). The port remains at the default 105, and
while you can play with the attributes tab, you don't really need to.