Aliasing in sendmail

An alias is an abbreviation for one or more full mailing addresses. Although an alias may be merely a nickname for a longer address you don’t want to type every time (such as “john” for “john.dagenhamster@someothercompany.com”), an alias may also be the name of a list of several recipients.

Many MUAs maintain their own alias lists, but these alias lists are normally in formats that aren’t shareable with other MUAs. If you typically use pine on a Linux workstation, its alias file will not be available to your Lotus Notes client on your Windows 95 workstation when you write a letter with that tool. In contrast, the many possible alias lists contained in aliases maintained in sendmail’s alias file will be recognized and expanded when a message is processed by sendmail, regardless of the MUA used to create that message. sendmail allows for multiple alias files—up to twelve by default.

From Here…

For related information, see Chapter 33, “Using Electronic Mail,” which shows how to communicate with other people by using the e-mail system.

•  You can learn more details about sendmail from the Web at http://www.sendmail.org/ or from Bryan Costales’ and Eric Allman’s book sendmail, second edition, from O’Reilly & Associates.

•  Chapter 33, “Using Electronic Mail,” covers the use of mail user agents such as elm, pine, and mutt to read and compose electronic mail.