Using Pegasus Mail LDAP Client
with the VU Directory

E-mail addresses for university staff, faculty and students

Sending e-mail to library staff is easy--we have set up address books and distribution lists within Pegasus Mail for this purpose. But sending mail to individuals outside the library can be a little more difficult. We have implemented a new service to help with this issue.

If you've ever needed to find the e-mail address for non-library people on campus, you may have discovered that many are listed in the regular part of the university telephone directory. The campus network also has a directory service, VUdirectory (http://directory.vanderbilt.edu) which lists many e-mail addresses and can be searched by name. It can be reached from the university's home page by selecting 'People at Vanderbilt' or 'Directory'. This directory includes people who have VUnet ID's and who have agreed to be listed in the directory, so it does not include everyone.

Library staff can get to this VUdirectory information without having to get out of Pegasus and launch a web browser. Pegasus has a utility called an LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) client that we have configured to access this same information. The client allows you to search the VU Directory by name and to automatically pass e-mail addresses into a mail message.

To find the e-mail address of someone on campus follow these steps:

1. Under the Tools menu in Pegasus Mail, select Extensions, and select the LDAP Client choice. A panel will appear titled "LDAP Client:"

2. In the "Using this Directory" field, Click on the drop-down arrow and select "Vanderbilt University X.500 Directory".

3. Construct a query to find the name. In most cases you can leave the boxes alone, and just type the last name of your recipient in the third field. Although other search types are possible with other directory servers, it appears that the surname search is the only one that consistently returns results in VUDirectory.

4. Press the Button.

5. If you find the name you want, then double click on that line in the "Results" box. This will initiate a new message and past into it the proper e-mail address. If you already have a message window open, you can position your cursor in the To: field and press the button in the LDAP client to transfer the e-mail address into that field.

Limitations. You can not start and restart the LDAP client within a Pegasus session. If you exit the LDAP client, you will need to restart Pegasus Mail to use it again. You can avoid this error by leaving the LDAP window open.

Problems. If you see this message:

1. In Pegasus Mail, select Options from the Tools menu.
2. Click on the Advanced Options box under the Categories column
3. In the section under "If WINSOCK.DLL is available, load it:", select "On Demand only". Example.