All rights reserved.
486 | Chapter 13: Mailing Lists and ~/.forward
This causes the mail message to be delivered to the local users jim and phil in the normal
way. That is, each undergoes additional alias processing, and the ~/.forward file
of each is examined to see whether either should be forwarded. The recipient \bob, on
the other hand, is delivered without any further aliasing because of the leading backslash.
Finally, the message is appended to the file /u/bob/admin/maillog.
Internal mailing lists can become very complex as they strive to support the needs of
large institutions. Examine the following simple, but revealing, example:
research: user1, user2
applications: user3, user4
admin: user5, user6
advertising: user7, user8
engineering: research, applications
frontoffice: admin, advertising
everyone: engineering, frontoffice
Only the first four aliases expand to real usernames. The last three form mailing lists
out of combinations of those four, the last being a superset that includes all users.
When the number of mailing lists is small and they don??™t change often, they can be
effectively managed as part of the aliases file. But as their number and size grow, you
should consider moving individual lists to external files.*
13.2 :include: Mailing Lists
The special notation :include: in the righthand side of an alias causes sendmail to
read its list of recipients from an external file.
Pages:
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862
863
864
865
866
867
868
869
870
871