Chapter 12. Maintain Aliases
Aliasing is the process of replacing one
recipient address with one or more different recipient addresses. The
replacement address can be that of a single user, a list of
recipients, a program, a file, or any mixture of these. In this
chapter we cover the aliases(5) file, one of the
three methods of aliasing available with the
sendmail program. We will cover the other two
forms, :include: (for including separate files
from within the aliases file) and
~/.forward (the user’s personal
:include: file), in the next chapter.
Aliasing can be used to handle several complex delivery problems:
Delivering mail to a single user under a variety of usernames
Distributing a mail message to many users by specifying only a single recipient name
Appending mail to files for archival and other purposes
Filtering mail through programs and shell scripts
All the information that is needed to perform these tasks is contained in the aliases(5) file (which is often also stored in database format to expedite the lookup process).
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