Topic: pseudonyms - is it important?

[jane]

Hi all,

I'm curious what is the purpose of pseudonyms? If I'm not mistaken, it has been use to detect same firstname and lastname is it?

How about if I'm goona make an accounts on my system approx to 15k. Shall I still need this pseudonyms features? In other case, can I disable this feature?

Thanks, Please advice.
Sorry for my approximate english.

[Cyrus Bharda]

Jane,

My personal understanding of what the purpose of pseudonyms is to create an alias address for accounts.

For example my account (username bob) might get 3 email addresses, bob@domain.com / sales@domain.com / users@domain.com now instead of creating 3 different email accounts, you create 1 account and (in this case) 2 pseudonyms, or as many as you want.

So now you only have to check 1 account to get all the emaill addressed to each of the 3 different addresses.

Mitel has made it so that when you create an account, it automatically creates 2 pseudonym's using the inputed first and last names. Which is great if you use them, but personally I do not, so I just delete them.

But I have made several pseudonym's for accounts, such as webmaster, sales, enquiries, etc etc etc. I think you can make as many as you wish, I _think_?

Hope that helped!

Cyrus Bharda

[jane]

Thanks Cyrus Bharda.

Very appreciated for your fast responds and details. It's helped very much!

[Ray Mitchell]

Jane
In my experience deleting the unwanted pseudonyms will only get rid of them temporarily.

If you make system changes or instal rpms and do a console save (or similar signal-event console-save), you will find that all the firstname.lastname and firstname_lastname style pseudonyms will be created again automatically.

The coding to do this appears to be in the base code of sme and as it is not templated it is not so easily changed, and probably not a good idea to change either as it may stuff up future upgrades etc.

There was a post in these forums a long time ago (> 1year) about changing the pseudonym behaviour, but it was a bit vague and only suggested which files to look at to change.

Regards
Ray Mitchell

[del]

Hi Jane,
Another use of the pseudonyms is if a user has a name that could be spelt differently, lets take your name as an example, your address is jane@domain.com if you made a pseudonym like jayne@domain.com if I took your address over the phone or something and mis-spelt it it would still get to your mail box.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Del

[Jáder Marasca]

I tought in another use to pseudonyms...
GET RIDE OF spammers.

Imagine you went to fill in a form to download some software and need to send your e-mail so them can send you an activation code (they just love to do this because they force you to give them a real/working e-mail).

So create an alias (for myself I´d create something like: jader-symantec for a symantec site) and point it to your name.

After a few days you just delete your pseudonym.

You can do the same to meetings / a fair or just a local group... create an alias (pseudonym) for each group/ocasion... if one of them is getting to many spams... delete it!

I think this can help discover how you can get so much spam!

[Cyrus Bharda]

Ray,

AH ha, now I know why all those blasted pseudonym's reapear after I do upgrades!! But there has to be a way of turning the automatic creation of these pseudonym's off as I do not use them at all!

It just doesnt seem right that they would "force" you to have them all created every time you do a console-save type action, (sounds like a M$ feature ) but by your post it seems it involves lots of tinkering with some major bits in SME, jeese that sucks, so everytime I do upgrade or have to issue a console-save, I'll have to spend 1.5 hours then deleting the unwanted pseudonym's, god what must people do if they have hundreds of users, I mean I only have about 75 users so I only have to delete 150 or so pseudonym's!! Is there a fast way of deleteing pseudonym's from the command prompt maybe?

Thanks,

Cyrus Bharda

[jane]

thanks all for a lots of ideas and comments. I still thinking that I dont need the pseudo created by an automatic cretion everytime an account is created. So I adding users with the batch script that I found created by Abe Loveless, comment any of the pseudo field, and the creation of an account working fine without creating the pseudo.

I had discover that any unwanted pseudo can be manually delete at /home/e-smith/accounts.

[jane]

thanks all for a lots of ideas and comments. I still thinking that I dont need the pseudo created by an automatic cretion everytime an account is created. So I adding users with the batch script that I found created by Abe Loveless, comment any of the pseudo field, and the creation of an account working fine without creating the pseudo.

I had discover that any unwanted pseudo can be manually delete at /home/e-smith/accounts.

[Cyrus Bharda]

Jane,

What happens when you issue a console-save type command, the SME will automatically create the psudonyms for you and volia you have several hundred, (depending on the number of users) psudonyms you do not want or need!?!?!

Cyrus Bharda

[Ray Mitchell]

Jane
Please direct us to a URL for that batch script of Abe Loveless you mentioned
Thanks
Ray Mitchell

[webweave]

If you are using your user name as your email then you are giving away a valid user name of an account on your server. I give users a user name and use a pseudonym for email, esp. if you give your users access to create their own passwords which could be weak.