Another feature worthy of discussion, since it's been getting lots of veiled references
throughout this document, is the host-path file. This is implemented using the uucp
pathalias database, with a file containing lines with the format:

• hostname address!%s
  or
• hostname %s@hostname

The actual details of the file are located in The Alias System Users Guide.

Anyway, to use them is quite simple...when specifying the address of someone, you
can either have an alias for them already, reply to their message, or use the system
alias feature!

Enough hype, right? Okay...to use this feature, you specify an address by either
"machine!person" ignoring if your specific machine can talk directly to the machine
specified, or, if you prefer the Internet addressing scheme, "person@machine". When
you enter the address as specified, the mailer will quickly search through the pathalias
database file and expand the specified address to be a legitimate routing address.

What's really nice about this is that the address that we're going to send to can be
either on ARPA, CSNET, BITNET, uucp, or any other network. The method of specifying
the basic address is the same regardless!

For example, mail to me could be sent as either "hplabs!taylor" or "taylor@hplabs". elm
will expand them both in the same manner and include a ``route'' to the machine
hplabs, if needed.

For those sites with the domains database installed, you can also mail to users on
domain based systems by simply specifying their name, the machine they receive mail
on and a full domain specification.

For example, say you have a friend Maurice who reads mail on JOEVAX in the Mailnet
world. You could mail to him by using the address "Maurice@JOEVAX.MAILNET" and
your system will expand the address correctly.

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