aliases - aliases file for sendmail
aliases
This file describes user ID aliases used by sendmail. The file resides in
/etc/mail and is formatted as a series of lines of the form
- name: addr_1, addr_2, addr_3, . . .
The
name is the name to alias, and the
addr_n are the aliases for
that name.
addr_n can be another alias, a local username, a local
filename, a command, an include file, or an external address.
- Local Username
- username
- The username must be available via getpwnam(3).
- Local Filename
- /path/name
- Messages are appended to the file specified by the full
pathname (starting with a slash (/))
- Command
- |command
- A command starts with a pipe symbol (|), it receives
messages via standard input.
- Include File
- :include: /path/name
- The aliases in pathname are added to the aliases for
name.
- E-Mail Address
- user@domain
- An e-mail address in RFC 822 format.
Lines beginning with white space are continuation lines. Another way to continue
lines is by placing a backslash directly before a newline. Lines beginning
with # are comments.
Aliasing occurs only on local names. Loops can not occur, since no message will
be sent to any person more than once.
If an alias is found for
name, sendmail then checks for an alias for
owner-name. If it is found and the result of the lookup expands to a
single address, the envelope sender address of the message is rewritten to
that address. If it is found and the result expands to more than one address,
the envelope sender address is changed to
owner-name.
After aliasing has been done, local and valid recipients who have a ``.forward''
file in their home directory have messages forwarded to the list of users
defined in that file.
This is only the raw data file; the actual aliasing information is placed into a
binary format in the file /etc/mail/aliases.db using the program
newaliases(1). A newaliases command should be executed each time the aliases
file is changed for the change to take effect.
newaliases(1),
dbm(3),
dbopen(3),
db_open(3),
sendmail(8)
SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide.
SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router.
If you have compiled sendmail with DBM support instead of NEWDB, you may have
encountered problems in
dbm(3) restricting a single alias to about 1000 bytes
of information. You can get longer aliases by ``chaining''; that is, make the
last name in the alias be a dummy name which is a continuation alias.
The
aliases file format appeared in 4.0BSD.