Pine (Program for Internet News and Email)

Using Aliases with the Pine Address Book

Pine has a facility to create abbreviations or short names of some of the addresses or groups of addresses you send mail to frequently. These short names are called aliases. Pine maintains a list of these aliases in an Address Book. The Address Book menu shown below can be accessed by the 'a' command. The Address Book menu looks similar to the Folder Index screen, but instead of mail messages, defined aliases are listed in this screen.

This screen is used for adding and editing the current aliases set up for Pine. The screen is divided into several columns. The first column lists the actual alias names that are used in the To: field of the mail messages. The second column lists the real names of the users which are aliased, or a long name to recognize a distribution list. The last column shows the actual email addresses of the users specified by the given alias. In the case of multiple recipients, there is a heading "Distribution List" and then the user email addresses. A distribution list may also contain other aliases which have been define previously.

The Address Book screen has its own set of commands, some of which are listed here.

?

Goes to the online Help screen for Pine.

m

Returns the user to the Main Menu screen.

a

Adds a new alias to the Address Book.

d

Deletes the currently selected alias entry.

e

Allows the user to edit and change the currently selected alias entry.

s

Creates a new distribution list for multiple recipients.

z

Adds a new user (or alias) name to the given distribution list.

In order to create a new alias for a single user, you use the 'a' the command. After entering the command, Pine will ask for the alias's full name. This is the person's real name or the group's long descriptive name. Then Pine will ask you for a nickname for this person/group. This is the name that you will use to reference the person or group of people for which you are creating the alias, and should be short but informative. It is used in place of a username in the To: field when sending mail. After entering the alias' name, you will be asked to supply the actual email address of the person/group in the alias.

If, however, you wish to create an alias which will mail several people in a distribution list, then you will use the 's' command to create the new alias. Pine will first ask for the long name description for the list in question. Then, the user will be asked for the nickname or alias which this group will be known and mailed as (Entered into the To: field). Pine will then continue to prompt for an email address to add to the distribution list. When you are finished entering names, hit a by itself.

After creating the alias, use the 'm' command to return to the Main Menu screen. Below is an example alias being created:

New full name (Last, First): Bearcat, Sally
Enter new nickname (one word and easy to remember): sally
Enter new e-mail address: sbearcat@email.uc.edu
             [Addition complete. Address book updated.]

The next time you want to send email to Sally Bearcat, you can send email to "sally", and Pine will expand the address and send mail to the user in the example.

Editing Existing Aliases

After an alias or distribution list has been created, Pine allows you to edit it by pressing 'e' in the Address Book menu. If the currently selected field is a single user alias or a user name within a distribution list, the following choices are available:

Edit which field ?
^G Help       N Nickname   F Fullname    C Comment
^C Cancel     A [Address]  G Fcc

From here, the choices are to change the nickname of the selected alias by pressing 'n', to change the fullname of the selected alias by pressing 'f', to change the email address of the selected alias by pressing 'a', and to add an optional comment to the alias by pressing 'c'.