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.