[H-GEN] sendmail aliases

[Ewan Edwards]

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Clearly, I need to supply some additional information to clarify a few things.

1.  The hostname of "the other mail server" that my email client uses for 
incoming mail is tenmail.

2.  The hostname of the Solaris box is mtmail.

3.  I was rather curious about the version warning too; but I took the 
attitude that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

4.  The main alias file "aliases" includes the following lines amongst many 
hundreds of others.
ewane: ewane at tenmail.mincom.oz.au.DIRECT
pgs: pgs at mtmail.mincom.oz.au.DIRECT

5.  I have tried modifying the alias.local file to have a) just the local 
user alias (pgs), and b) just the remote alias (ewane).  Neither mod made any 
difference.

6.  I thought about creating a new user account for mtjoke on the Solaris box 
and using the ~/.forward file approach, but decided that a local alias file 
was a much neater solution.

7.  There are a number of mail servers on our network in addition to those 
mentioned here, including a couple of Domino servers and at least one 
Exchange server.  (and I'm not going to enter into a discussion regarding 
that fact or how good or bad it might be)



On Monday 15 April 2002 11:24, you wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>
> 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


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