aliasme.README ----------------------------------------------------------

PURPOSE: 
         The purpose of aliasme is to allow users to create and maintain
         their own e-mail aliases. 

DEPENDENCIES:
         aliasme is dependant upon sendmail (or more precisely, the 
         "newaliases" or "sendmail -bi" function that generates e-mail
         aliases within the sendmail suite.
         Also make sure that sed and awk are installed, as they are used
         heavily to make this work. 

MOTIVATION:
         Other MTA software such as postfix had this feature already
         implemented. I thought that it was a nice feature since, as 
         postmaster, I enjoy making 1001 aliases for myself, I imagine
         that regular users would find the same great uses for
         themselves.

USE:
         Install the aliasme script somewhere in root's PATH. I put mine
         in /usr/local/bin. 

         Create a group named "alias" and populate it with all the 
         usernames of those you wish to grant this privilege.

         Create the directory /etc/mail/aliasme. This is where the 
         program stores all its changes. 
         
         Instruct users to create a .aliases file in their home 
         directories. This file should contain one alias per line using 
         only lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens and/or underscores.
         All other characters are illegal and will error out.

         Users can check validity of their aliases defined in their 
         .alias files by running aliasme in check mode: "$ aliasme -k"
         on the command line. 
 
         The sysadmin may also run a validity check on all
         alias users by running aliasme in check mode as root: 
         "# aliasme -k" (Note: the program uses $USER to identify who is
         issuing the command, so running this using "sudo" will produce
         errors

         Sysadmin may run aliasme from the command line or, 
         alternatively, from cron. I use cron to update 4 times per hour,
         allowing frequent alias changes by the users. Here's a sample
         crontab entry:

             ### process user aliases ###################################
             1,16,31,46 * * * * /usr/local/bin/aliasme > dev/null 

         aliasme actually puts out a decent amount of feedback so you may
         wish to pipe stdout to /dev/null like I did. Otherwise cron will
         mail me 4 times an hour just to show me the output of aliasme,
         which can get old, fast.

PROBLEMS:
         aliasme excludes previously defined aliases for the users that it
         is validating but it will only clear listings that it created
         when updating. So if the postmaster defines a user alias by hand
         and the user defines that same alias in his .aliases file, the 
         program will write an alias file with duplicate entries and error
         upon commiting those changes. Fix by removing all manual user 
         alias definitions from the /etc/mail/aliases file and instead 
         instruct the user to include them in his .aliases file.

AUTHOR:
         Chuck Geigner, 17 Sept 2003
         aliasme v0.1-4 Beta
         (c) 2003, Licenced for use under the GNU LGPL:
         http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html

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