aliases(4)                                                       aliases(4)

NAME
     aliases - aliases file for sendmail

SYNOPSIS
     /etc/aliases

DESCRIPTION
     This file describes user ID aliases used by /usr/sbin/sendmail. The
     file resides in /etc and is formatted as a series of lines of the form

          name: name1, name2, name3, ...

     The name is the name to alias, and the namen are the aliases for that
     name. Lines beginning with white space are continuation lines. Lines
     beginning with # are comments.

     Aliasing occurs only on local names. Loops cannot occur, since no mes-
     sage will be sent to any person more than once.

     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/aliases.db using the pro-
     gram newaliases(1M). A newaliases command should be executed each time
     the aliases file is changed for the change to take effect.

NOTES
     If you have compiled sendmail with DBM support instead of NEWDB, you
     may have encountered problems in dbm(3X) restricting a single alias to
     about 1000 bytes of information. You can get longer aliases by "chain-
     ing"; that is, make the last name in the alias be a dummy name which
     is a continuation alias.

SEE ALSO
     newaliases(1M), sendmail(1M), dbm(3X).


















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