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How to Set Up Mail Aliases in Berkeley Mail

From time to time it is nice to only have to type an alias for a person's email address. This is especially useful if the person's email address changes from time to time. To do this in Berkeley Mail do the following.

Create a file called "~/.mailrc" to store the aliases. The format of the file looks like:

    alias  alias  real-address

For example, if you want to send mail to "johndoe@wam.umd.edu" and call the alias "john", you would have:

    alias  john  johndoe@wam.umd.edu

Whenever you use an alias ("john") address, it will be automatically expanded to the real address ("johndoe@wam.umd.edu").

To create a list alias called class, you would do:

    alias class  addr1  addr2  addr3  addr4  ...

Where addr1 etc., could be either previously defined alias or a real address. For example you could have:

    alias john johndoe@wam.umd.edu
    alias mary marydoe@wam.umd.edu
    alias does john mary bobdoe@wam.umd.edu

As with the single alias above, when you type in the list alias, it will be expanded to the real email addresses.