NYU WEB

When Is Your Real Name Your Alias?

David J. Frederickson

Looking for current information about email aliases? Click here to go to the NYU Email section of the ITS website >>

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Now, you can even have mail sent to you under your real name. Revolutionary concept.

The old usernames were designed for efficiency in various computer systems and for different administrative reasons. Some had to be eight characters, neither more nor less, all caps; some could be either caps or lowercase; some included numbers. All were relatively short, since not too long ago, anything long slowed things down. Ideally, the usernames would be memorable, but the ideal was often not realized.

From now on, usernames will be replaced by NetIDs, which are formed from a person's initials and a number. It seems I'm the first person with the initials DJF to be issued a NetID, so mine is djf1; the next person will be djf2, and so on. Simple, and easy to remember. If I get a new e-mail account, it will be housed on the newest IS machine, and my actual e-mail address will be djf1@is5.nyu.edu . A bit crisper than the old frdrcksn@acfcluster.nyu.edu .

But why not a real name?

You may have noticed that for the past year or so we've been publishing e-mail addresses for ACF staff members with their real names; we've been testing out a system that can look up the full names in a file and direct the mail to the actual account; for instance, mail sent to david.frederickson@nyu.edu would be redirected to my account at djf1@is5.nyu.edu .

In computer parlance, david.frederickson is an alias—an alternative name that is listed in the lookup table with my actual username or NetID. Any member of the NYU faculty or staff can have such a real-name alias or business-card alias. In a day when multi-megabyte video files are being transmitted over the networks, a few extra bits to provide intelligible names are bytes well nibbled. Aside from the paradox of calling a real name an alias, it's a good development. The beauty of the system is that if your e-mail account is moved to a different machine, you don't need to notify anyone; we simply reset the forwarding address and your mail follows.

This isn't the only use for an alias. Mail programs can use aliases (or, as some mailers call them, nicknames) to save time. I have my copy of Eudora (the mail program I use) configured so that when I type in a short nickname, Eudora supplies the full name and e-mail address: I type jj and the message goes to jurowj@nyu.edu, where Jordan Jurow can read it.

An alias can also supply several addresses: I type contrib, and Eudora looks up a list of nicknames on that list, then supplies the full addresses for a couple of dozen regular contributors and sends a message to them. Conversely, a group of people—the staff of an office, the people who share a responsibility, the officers of a club—might want to set up an alias with the ACF that forwards mail sent to a group to the individual members of the group; thus such aliases as postmaster@nyu.edu, registrar@nyu.edu, comment@acf.nyu.edu .

Any NYU department or office, or any OSA-recognized student club, can set up the second kind of e-mail alias. Here are a few guidelines:

• The name should be meaningful and intelligible.
• If it has more than one word, the words should be separated by a period (dot), rather than a dash, underscore, hyphen, or other character.
• If it has fewer than 9 characters, it should have a dot in it (to avoid confusion with an existing 8-character-or-less username).

If you're not in a rush, wait a few weeks. Soon it will be possible to request your alias online, through the ACF Web pages at {http://www.nyu.edu/acf/}.