Addressing Email Messages in Pine

Q: What is the best way to address messages in Pine? I'm sometimes confused by the UW Directory results that I now get.

A: Although there is no simple answer, two pieces of advice may help:

When you know an email address that you will likely use again, add it to your Pine Address Book. Give it a simple nickname, which you use to address messages.
When your correspondent is at the UW and you don't have their address in your Pine Address Book, enter their real name on the address line and press <Return>.

Doing the latter starts a search of the online faculty/staff and student directories that checks for first or last names, so you could enter:

To: frank hart To: f hart To: hart

If more than one match is found, you will get a list of "harts" from which to choose.

Add Address Book Entries

If you are accustomed to entering an "unqualified" email address like this:

To: hart

and seeing that expand to

To: hart@u.washington.edu

then the automatic directory searches may be annoying to you. Try adding Address Book entries for these cases, or try to get the search to work for you by entering first and last name.

Change or Stop Automatic Directory Searches

If the costs of searching the UW Directory outweigh the benefits for you, then you may want to configure Pine either to stop doing directory searches automatically when you are composing a message, or to use different search criteria to limit the number of names returned.

To change your directory lookup options, at the Pine Main Menu go to Setup > Directory. The Setup Directory Server screen appears with UW Directory highlighted. Type C (Change). You can then:

Move to the Feature Name line "[X] use-implicitly-from-composer" and type X (Set/Unset) to disable this automatic lookup feature, or
Scroll down to "search-type" to select which field(s) will be searched, or
Go to "search-rule" to change where a match is found (the current default on Homer and Dante is 'equals')

Whether you decide to disable directory searching in composing or to try different search criteria, type E (Exit Setup) and Y (Yes) to save your setting changes. Remember to use "Help" for information on each of these settings.

If you disable automatic directory lookups, Pine will still do Address Book and local computer account lookups. You can also access the UW Directory when you are composing an email message in Pine. Press <Control> T (To AddrBk) and select UW Directory to search for a name.

University of Washington Computing & Communications
Windows on Computing, No. 23, Spring 1999
newsltr@cac.washington.edu