ALIASES(5)                FreeBSD File Formats Manual               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/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)