ALIASES(5) FreeBSD File Formats Manual ALIASES(5)
NAME
aliases - aliases file for smtpd
DESCRIPTION
This manual page describes the format of the aliases file, as used by
smtpd(8). An alias, in its simplest form, is used to assign an arbitrary
name to an email address or a group of email addresses. This provides a
convenient way to send mail. For example an alias could refer to all
users of a group: email to that alias would be sent to all members of the
group. Much more complex aliases can be defined however: an alias can
refer to other aliases, be used to send mail to a file instead of another
person, or to execute various commands.
Within the file, `#' is a comment delimiter; anything placed after it is
discarded. The file consists of key/value mappings of the form:
key: value1, value2, value3, ...
key is always folded to lowercase before alias lookups to ensure that
there can be no ambiguity. The key is expanded to the corresponding
values, which consist of one or more of the following:
user A user on the host machine. The user must have a valid entry in
the passwd(5) database file.
/path/to/file
Append messages to file, specified by its absolute pathname.
|command
Pipe the message to command on its standard input. The command
is run under the privileges of the daemon's unprivileged account.
:include:/path/to/file
Include any definitions in file as alias entries. The format of
the file is identical to this one.
user-part@domain-part
An email address in RFC 5322 format. If an address extension is
appended to the user-part, it is first compared for an exact
match. It is then stripped so that an address such as
[email protected] will only use the part that precedes `+' as
a key.
error:code message
A status code and message to return. The code must be 3 digits,
starting 4XX (TempFail) or 5XX (PermFail). The message must be
present and can be freely chosen.
FILES
/etc/mail/aliases Default aliases file.
SEE ALSO
smtpd.conf(5), makemap(8), newaliases(8), smtpd(8)
HISTORY
The aliases file format appeared in 4.0BSD.
FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8 February 13, 2021 FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8