bionic (5) aliases.sendmail.5.gz

Provided by: sendmail-bin_8.15.2-10_amd64 bug

NAME

       aliases - aliases file for sendmail

SYNOPSIS

       aliases

DESCRIPTION

       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.

SEE ALSO

       newaliases(1), dbm(3), dbopen(3), db_open(3), sendmail(8)

       SENDMAIL Installation and Operation Guide.

       SENDMAIL An Internetwork Mail Router.

BUGS

       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.

HISTORY

       The aliases file format appeared in 4.0BSD.

                                          $Date: 2013-11-22 20:51:55 $                                ALIASES(5)