TrinityOS: A Guide to Configuring Your Linux Server for Performance, Security, and Manageability: Mail aliases for system administration

18. Mail aliases for system administration

If you rarely login as root on this Linux server but you *DO* login or read email on another account, I recommend to redirect your "root" mail to that email address.

Please see the Sendmail documentation in Section 25 on the various changes to Sendmail over the various versions but for now, do the following:

    Sendmail - 8.9.x :     /etc/aliases
            or
    Sendmail - 8.1x.x :    /etc/mail/aliases

To do this, change the line towards the bottom of the file

NOTE: If you want to have a given email go to MULTIPLE email addresses, simply #'ed out the following line and then create the file ~root/.forward. In this file, put all of the desired to-be-forwarded email addresses in this file (one email address per line).

Edit the /etc/aliases file and insert the following lines after the "root" line towards the bottom if you have YOUR OWN DOMAIN and run the Sendmail daemon:

                #If you have your own domain name and run DNS
                hostmaster: root

                #If you run a WWW site
                webmaster: root

                #If you have your own domain and run email servers
                postmaster: root
                abuse: root

                #For example: root: johndoe@acme123.com
                root: your-final-destination-email-address

Now you need to compile up this new alias file by running the command "newaliases". If you get a warning about duplicated lines, simply remove the duplicate lines and re-run "newaliases".

NOTE: If you are running a older version of Sendmail.. I could tell you how to fix your aliasing issues BUT, I'm going to make you upgrade your version of Sendmail! There are so many security issues with older versions of Sendmail that it's just not worth it.

NOTE-2: Please note that if this machine will be acting as a SECONDARY mail server for other Internet domains, you need to know about possible conflicts between the /etc/mail/local-host-names and /etc/mail/aliases files. Please see Section 25 for all the critical details.

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