Re: [cpx] not intuitive, at all. (cpx)

[Scott Wiersdorf <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 12:38:32PM -0700, Jonathan Duncan wrote:
> also, domain admin, account holder).  I think that once the vocab is 
> sorted out and people understand the words used, it may become a lot 
> clearer.

I agree. During the design, our biggest challenge was communicating
about these sort of abstract ideas. Here's an example:

<real example>
We have the concept of an "email address". It is not strictly a
virtusertable entry (but it _can_ be), nor is it an alias entry (but
it _can_ be).

>From the end user's point of view, an email address is something you
can send mail to (e.g., scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx). Under the hood, it might
be implemented as a simple virtusertable entry pointing to my user
account:

    (/etc/mail/virtusertable):
    scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx      scott

But if you make the email address deliver to a list of people, now
it's a virtusertable entry that points to an alias:

    (/etc/mail/virtusertable):
    scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx      scott~perlcode.org

    (/etc/mail/aliases):
    scott~perlcode.org:     scott,scotts_brother,scott@xxxxxxxxx

If you add a forward or autoreply, there are also .procmailrc changes.
We deliberately chose to hide this complexity from the user by calling
the whole concept an "email address". The "email address" itself
doesn't change, but where the mail goes is entirely up to the end
user.

You can have email addresses for different domains that go to the same
user:

    scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx    scott
    scott@xxxxxxxxxx      scott2

This way people don't get cranky about not having their favorite email
address (they still need to POP or IMAP their mail using the system
username, but if they only use the CPX webmail, they don't even need
to do that).
</real example>

Similar terminology shifts like this were made for words like "domain"
and "domain administrator", "end user", "server administrator", etc.
The help files address a good amount of these terms. I'm hoping that
once we can all speak the same vocabulary, we can make better sense
of some of the comments and suggestions.

Scott
-- 
Scott Wiersdorf
<scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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