Subject: Re: Addressbook format [

From: Rick Troth <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 93 12:27:57 CST

>> >We also have a program to convert between RICE mailer notebooks and the
>> >Pine addressbook.  The author is Tom Remmers.  ([email-masked].)
>...
>>
>> Rick Troth <[email-masked]>,  Rice University,  Information Systems
>>
>
>Thanks Rick, we are using successfully your tools.  However, we wonder
>if there is also a tool for VM's "names" conversion.

        Umm...   I didn't write the other program mentioned above.
There are two.   Also,  in creating that,  I was bitten yet again by the
"plain text" != "plain text"  problem,  where  SMTP  appears to be
plain text,  822 and 821 read as if plain text is the intention,
but some implementations (pine) get away with a stricter definition.

        The problem was ... on VM systems there's no such thing as a
completely empty line.   So a line that looks empty will have at least
one blank space,  maybe more.   Elm didn't care;  I seem to recall that
ZMail didn't care either;  but Pine was  NOT HAPPY  that the blank line
following the header wasn't really empty.   :-(

        So I fixed my migration tool to write the UNIX mbox file in
binary.   Pine is *still* unhappy with the notebooks I create.   This is
with  3.07,  though.   Gimme a chance to try again whenver we upgrade.

>--
>\Oved

--
Rick TrOth <[email-masked]>, Rice University, Information Systems

---

From: Rick Troth <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 93 12:34:32 CST

>if there is also a tool for VM's "names" conversion.

        CMS NAMES and CMS NAMEFIND,  yes indeed!   We  "really really"
need a tool on UNIX like CMS' NAMES and NAMEFIND utilities.   Hmmm...
this should also cross into the SMTP/822/MIME discussion where Greg
Vandreuil's Application/Signature has been getting kicked around.
I'll do that in a separate posting to follow that thread's subject line.

        Here's my App/Sig which comes to you from my NAMES file:

            Name: Rick Troth, RUA
            Email: [email-masked]
            Telephone:
            Fax:
            Address: 11558 Withers Way Circle;Houston, TX 770xx
            Portrait:

        Don't have my portrait in there yet.   :-(    Soon though.
And there's no phone or FAX at the new house.   There are also other
fields that App/Sig defines.   Anyway,  the point of this is that
NAMES gives me a general purpose flat-file plain-text user-maintainable
database for this kind of information.

        My supervisor in a previous life once created a UNIX 'names'
program.   It kept the database in  $HOME/.names.   (file is called
<userid> NAMES  in the CMS implementation)   I don't think it was
ever integrated,  though.   Surely would be nice,  though,  if such a
generic tool were available and used by at least  *one*  application.
I believe others would follow ... if the tool were simple enough
while still reliable.   RiceMAIL uses CMS NAMES because it's there,
it's easy to use,  interfacing with it is trivial.

        The format of a CMS NAMES file is:

                :tag.data :tag.data :tag.data  ...

        where the tag  ":nick."  is sacred and delimits entries.
The tags can be anything you like.   The CMS NAMES program defines
the following fields:

            Nickname, Userid, Node (historical that node is separate),
            Notebook (where to log mail for this person),
            Name, Phone, and Address (surface mail, that is),
            and  "List of Names"  which is a group alias definition.

        Usually,  though,  I don't even use NAMES.   I just edit the
file by hand.   It's too easy.   The NAMEFIND tool is invoked by
any application that wants to extract data from this database.

        I think I wrote a crefty tool once to read NAMES format on UNIX.
It's been a *long* time,  though.   And since I haven't gotten around to
writing my own mail user agent 
snickerY I haven't had an occasion to
actually  *use*  the generic tool.

        I'm really glad you mentioned NAMES.   Let's see it happen!