[H-GEN] sendmail aliases

[Ewan Edwards]

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Good morning all,

This is for all you sendmail gurus out there.

Due to my lack of experience and understanding of how sendmail works, I'm 
having a problem with getting a sendmail alias to do what I think it should 
be doing and now need a few clues about what to look at next.

First a bit of background;
I look after a Solaris box that, amongst many other things, is the mail 
server for one of the development teams where I work.  The mail aliases for 
the company are kept on the central internal mail server to which I do not 
have access.  The aliases files are pushed out from that main server to the 
other mail servers, including my Solaris box, every hour.  

I am trying to create a pseudo mail list for a just a few people in the 
development team.  It isn't appropriate to try creating a new majordomo list, 
and I don't have access to do so.

I have created an aliases.local file and added a new AliasFile line to 
sendmail.cf on the Solaris mail server.  I made sure the new line in 
sendmail.cf was of exactly the same format as the other AliasFile lines.  The 
aliases.local file is a simple two line file as follows.
<snip>
#
mtjoke: ewane,pgs
</snip>

I have run newaliases on the mail server just to make sure that the new 
database file was created and that sendmail would be able to find the new 
alias.  Everything seemed fine, as follows.  (newaliases is run by sendmail 
automatically when the new aliases files anyway)
<snip>
# newaliases
Warning: .cf file is out of date: sendmail 8.9.3 supports version 8, .cf file 
is version 6
/etc/mail/aliases.extras: 3194 aliases, longest 329 bytes, 49701 bytes total
/etc/mail/aliases.external: 11 aliases, longest 31 bytes, 408 bytes total
/etc/mail/aliases: 4032 aliases, longest 60 bytes, 116917 bytes total
/etc/mail/aliases.majordomo: 3786 aliases, longest 71 bytes, 254359 bytes 
total
/etc/mail/aliases.orgunits: 525 aliases, longest 319 bytes, 23704 bytes total
/etc/mail/aliases.local: 1 aliases, longest 9 bytes, 15 bytes total
#
</snip>

I have run sendmail in verify mode to check that the alias was okay and 
deliverable. 
<snip>
# sendmail -bv mtjoke            
pgs... deliverable: mailer local, user pgs
ewane at tenmail.mincom.oz.au.DIRECT... deliverable: mailer smtp, host 
tenmail.mincom.oz.au, user
ewane at tenmail.mincom.oz.au
</snip>

My mail client is configured to use the Solaris box as the SMTP server for 
sending mail.  For incoming mail, I have an ordinary user account on one of 
the other mail servers.

The problem;
Any attempt to send a message to that new alias results in an SMTP error 
response 550 (User unknown) being returned from the mail server and the email 
client telling me that the address is undeliverable.  I don't know what else 
to look for to try to get this working.  Any clues will be appreciated.

Regards,
Ewan

-- 
Ewan Edwards BE MIEAust CPEng MCSE
Development Support Engineer
Mincom
Ewan.Edwards at mincom.com
Telephone: +61 (0) 7 3303 3554
Facsimile: +61 (0) 7 3303 3470
http://www.mincom.com
Mincom. The People. The Experience. The Vision.
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