E-Mail Aliases
An E-Mail alias is simply a forwarding E-mail address. Each E-mail alias you create forwards E-mail
on to any E-mail address that you specify. E-Mail aliases are often used to create handy
replacements for long or difficult to remember e-mail addresses. They can also be used to create
generic E-mail addresses such as webmaster@yourcompany.com and info@yourcompany.com.
For example, say you want to create a webmaster E-mail alias on the yourcompany.com
Virtual Private Server that automatically forwards to your local ISP E-mail account,
you@your-isp.com. On the yourcompany.com Virtual Private Server, you would create an
E-mail alias like this:
webmaster: you@your-isp.com
It's that easy! And you can create as many E-mail aliases as you want on your Virtual Private
Server: there's no limit!
An alias can have multiple recipients. For example:
webmaster: you@your-isp.com, someone@YOUR-DOMAIN.NAME
If you have a long list of recipients for an alias, you can use the include option to look
at a list. This also comes in handy if you need to change the list frequently, since changing the
list won't require you to run newaliases. To include a list, use the following format:
listname: :include: /path/to/file
The list file is simply a text file containing one recipient's address per line.
There are a number of other things you can do with the aliases file. More information can
be found in the man page:
% man aliases
Creating Aliases
E-mail aliases can be viewed and edited in the /etc/mail/aliases file on your VPS. The E-mail
alias you create should look something like this:
alias: E-mail_address
In order for sendmail to use your aliases, you must create an /etc/mail/aliases.db
file which the sendmail program can read. Run the following command from the shell on your
VPS v2 as the root user.
newaliases
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