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TrueDuality
Asked: 2009-12-04 07:32:07 +0800 CST

Including additional alias files in Sendmail

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I've run into an issue with a piece of third party software that creates it's own alias file to be used by sendmail. Looking through the configuration options, google, and the man pages it seems like I can only define one alias file which means either I only get all the software's addresses or all of the local aliases.

I have tried appending my own entries to the software's alias file but it gets rebuilt everytime there is a change of addresses and my entries get blown away.

My question is, is there a way to define addional alias files in sendmail.mc or to include additional addresses from another file?

sendmail

3 Answers

  1. You can't have a second aliases file, but you can include a file using the syntax 

        :include: /path/name
    So define all your aliases in your aliases file, and then include the one created by your software.

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  2. Best Answer

    If you read the Sendmail documentation, you'll find:

    ALIAS_FILE  [/etc/mail/aliases] The location of the text version of the
alias file(s). It can be a comma-separated list of names (but be sure you
quote values with commas in them -- for example, use define(`ALIAS_FILE',
`a,b') to get "a" and "b" both listed as alias files; otherwise the
define() primitive only sees "a").

    So, you can edit your sendmail.mc file to use a common-delimited list of alias files, and then regenerate your sendmail.cf. And restart Sendmail.

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  3. Aliases of the form

    alias     :include:/path/to/some/alias_file

    take their email targets from the contents of alias_file. Put each email address on a separate line.

    For instance, if /usr/local/etc/my_list contains a list of addresses that you want to alias as "myfriends", you would use this entry in /etc/aliases:

    myfriends     :include:/usr/local/etc/my_list

    with my_list containing legal email addresses one per line like this

    phyllis
[email protected]
[email protected]
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