Aliases map names to address lists using personal, systemwide, and domainwide alias files. You can define three types of aliases:
personal | Defined by individual users in the user's $HOME/.mailrc file. |
local system | Defined by the mail system administrator in the /etc/aliases file. These aliases apply to mail handled by the sendmail command on the local system. Local system aliases rarely need to be changed. |
domainwide | Aliases are found using the Network Information Service (NIS).
(NIS must be configured and the O AliasFile option must be set in the sendmail.cf file.)
To enable use of the NIS aliases mapping:
If you use a domain hierarchy for NIS+, you may need one mail host for each domain in the namespace because names in separate domains may no longer be unique. For more information about NIS and NIS+ requirements, see AIX Version 4.3 Network Information Services (NIS and NIS+) Guide. |
The /etc/aliases file consists of a series of entries in the following format:
Alias: Name1, Name2, ... NameX
where Alias can be any alphanumeric string that you choose (not including special characters, such as @ or !). Name1 through NameX is a series of one or more recipient names. The list of names can span one or more lines. Each continued line begins with a space or a tab. Blank lines and lines beginning with a # (pound sign) are comment lines.
The /etc/aliases file must contain the following three aliases:
Any time you change this file, you must recompile it into a database format that the sendmail command can use. See Building the Alias Database .
To create or modify local system aliases:
writers: geo, mark@zeus, ctw@athena, brianThis definition could also be contained on several lines, as long as each added line begins with a space or a tab, for example:
writers: geo, mark@zeus, ctw@athena, brian
editors: glenda@hera, davidm@kronos, perryw@athena owner-editors: glenda@hera
The sendmail command does not use directly the alias definitions in the local system /etc/aliases file. Instead, the sendmail command reads a processed database manager (dbm) version of the /etc/aliases file. You can compile the alias database using one of the following methods:
Notes:
- If these files do not exist, the sendmail command cannot process mail and will generate an error message.
- If you have multiple alias databases specified, the -bi flag rebuilds all the database types it understands (for example, it can rebuild Network Database Management (NDBM) databases but not NIS databases).
The /etc/netsvc.conf file contains the ordering of system services. To specify the service ordering of aliases, add the following line:
aliases=service, service
where service can be either files or nis. For example:
aliases=files, nis
tells the sendmail command to try the local alias file first; and if that fails, try nis. If nis is defined as a service, it should be running.
For further information on the /etc/netsvc.conf file, see AIX Version 4.3 Files Reference.