This will, for a considerable time, mean that the maintenance and support load in ITS will be increased, but this increase would be less than that which would be caused by continued expansion of the existing systems. There does need to be a central Ph directory database, accessed through NFS by distributed and central servers. ITS would frequently update the master Ph directory, using data from the QuickMail and Banyan mail systems, and the ITS alias server. The alias server provides a single source of information about addresses, and can be incorporated into a Ph database relatively easily. Similarly, if one knows an email address within an email system, and the syntactical rules for encapsulating that address within an Internet address, it's simple, but tedious and error-prone, to derive the equivalent email Internet address.
Address translation is one service of the email gateways.
The University network provides two services to help with this - aliases, and directory services. An alias server run by ITS maintains a list of aliases, each of which translates to a real email address within the University. Aliases within the unimelb.edu.au domain are translated by the alias server, and forwarded to the appropriate real address. Aliases are more stable than real addresses, as they do not depend on the particular mail server or mail system used. They are in a format recognised throughout the world as an Internet address, and provide the means by which it is possible to implement a standard address format, which ITUC has indicated is desirable.