ALIASES(5)                                                                                                            ALIASES(5)



NAME
       aliases - aliases file for sendmail

SYNOPSIS
       aliases

DESCRIPTION
       This  file describes user ID aliases used by sendmail.  The file resides in /etc 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  user-
       name, 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  mes-
       sages 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/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: 2004/07/12 05:39:21 $                                        ALIASES(5)