Download Deploying DNS and Sendmail

What About Aliases?
• Aliases only on mail servers
• Two step creation process:
– Edit /etc/mail/aliases
– Run newaliases program
• Aliases can do lots of different things
(see next slide)
Aliases are a mechanism for creating an email address that points to a different user
or group of users, or possibly feeds mail to a program or into a text file. In general,
aliases are only appropriate for machines where mail delivery happens because
aliases are expanded only when the mail is just about to be delivered.
To create an alias, you edit the text file /etc/mail/aliases
(/etc/aliases on some systems) and add aliases at will. Once you've updated
the file, you need to run the newaliases program which creates a hashed
NDBM-style database of your aliases so that Sendmail can look them up faster.
Note that on most systems, newaliases is actually just a symbolic link to the
Sendmail program. When Sendmail is invoked as newaliases, it rebuilds the
alias NDBM files.
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