Plussed Detail Addressing
Plussed detail addressing is a simple way to achieve more versatile aliasing. It is available only with V8.7 sendmail and above, and it requires that you use a configuration file that comes with V8 sendmail. To illustrate its use, consider the need to have mail routed to different sets of administrators depending on how the address root is augmented:
root: hans, george root+db: root, dbadmin@server.db.here.edu root+*: root, root@here.edu
Here, the first line shows a normal sort of alias in which mail sent to root will instead be delivered to the local users hans and george. The second line is still not all that special because we could as easily have used an alias such as root_db to accomplish the same thing. It sends mail to root+db to the local root users and to the database administrators in another department, dbadmin@server.db.here.edu.
The third line is where things start to get
interesting. The +* in it will match anything or nothing
following the plus, so mail sent to
root+ will be sent both to
the local root users and to the
central administrators at
root@here.edu. But so will
anything following the plus that is not db, such as
root+foo.
If the +* form is
omitted:
root: hans, george root+db: root, dbadmin@server.db.here.edu
the default for plussed addresses other than root+db becomes root. That is, when sendmail looks up a plussed address (for example, root+foo) it does so in the following order:
Look for an exact match. Does root+foo match root+db?
Get sendmail, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
