On 2009, Oct 23, at 09:48, Jonathan Billings wrote: > On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 09:28:01AM -0400, John Stoffel wrote: >> Exactly. And it doesn't scale. Even at my small 400-500 person >> company we have conflicts with names. So, if you have two >> john.sm...@foo.com, who gets the email? Riddle me that batman... > > Years ago, I worked on a mail system that used an "intelligent" > algorithm to convert first.l...@domain to the appropriate email > address. It was particularly smart about misspellings, breaking it > down into phonemes, so you could send mail to johnathon.billings and > it'd get to me. If the mail system couldn't figure out who you were > asking for, it would generate an SMTP failure with a list of possible > matches in the error, so you'd get a bounce with useful information in > it.
This has gotten away from the file storage question a bit, but that sounds like the fuzzy/soundex matching that ph/qi would do. Count me partially in the purist camp in that if you're trying to mail someone, either the address is right or it's not. If you're trying to do a fuzzy match/search, use a different tool. On the e-mail side, the allowing of fuzzy deliveries is too much of a boon to the spammers which results in it being yet more maddening for the recipient as all of the spam to "close" names would go to them, too. I shudder to ponder if we still used ph now days. -philip _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
