ALIASES(5)                OpenBSD Programmer's Manual               ALIASES(5)

NAME
     aliases - aliases file for sendmail

SYNOPSIS
     aliases

DESCRIPTION
     This file describes user ID aliases used by /usr/sbin/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 2822 format.

     Lines beginning with whitespace 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(8).  A newaliases command should be executed each time the
     aliases file is changed for the change to take effect.

SEE ALSO
     dbm(3), dbopen(3), newaliases(8), sendmail(8)

HISTORY
     The aliases file format appeared in 4.0BSD.

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.

OpenBSD 4.9                    October 18, 2010                    OpenBSD 4.9