Usenet-addresses server

If you think that your target may be on the Usenet and may have posted a
message to the Usenet at some point in the past, you might be able to find 
his/her address in the Usenet address database on the machine rtfm.mit.edu. 

To query the database, send an E-mail message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu 
with "send usenet-addresses/name" in the body of the message. The "name" 
should be one or more space-separated words for which you want to search; 
since the search is fuzzy (i.e., all of the words you specify do not have 
to match), you should list all of the words you think might appear in the 
address, including (for example) first and last name, possible username, 
and possible components of the host name (e.g. "mit" for a person who you 
think is at MIT). The case and order of the words you list are ignored. 

Note that multiple requests can appear (on separate lines) in mail to the 
mail server, but each request will be answered in a separate message. 

In many cases, you will get a list of quite a few matching addresses, and 
you will have to go through it looking for ones that may be the one you're 
looking for. However, the mail server will return a maximum of only 40 matches. 

Note that the usenet-addresses database is accessible via WAIS (in fact, the 
script that does mail server searches is actually just a front-end to a WAIS 
database) on two different hosts: rtfm.mit.edu and cedar.cic.net. In both 
cases, the database is called "usenet-addresses" and is on port 210. Note 
that the version on rtfm is slightly more up-to-date with respect to the 
master address list than the version on cedar. If you don't know what WAIS 
is, then don't worry about this paragraph; if you're curious, see the 
"comp.infosystems.wais" newsgroup. 

For more details about how to use the database, send the command 
"send usenet-addresses/help".