Sendmail alias question

[pbdlists at pinboard.com]

Hi Bill,

The alias will simply be expanded to everything after the key, so your
example expands to "me" "you" "them" "us" "yall" whatever that might be.
These can be local users, lists, remote addresses or further groups. If
you want to restrict it to "me at local.domain" and "you at local.domain" and
"them at remote.domain" then
it should look like

folks: me at local.domain,you at local.domain,them at remote.domain

The aliases file works just like a translation: folks is translated to
exactly the list that follows. Your local sendmail then interprets that
list just as if those addresses were given as the recipients (an as
already mentioned, if one of those alias destinations is another alias,
that gets expanded again).

Maybe you want to have a look at
http://www.bga.org/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/mail/aliasing/

Hope this helps somewhat.

Cheers,

Kurt


On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 02:51:18PM -0800, Bill Watson wrote:
> This is probably too far off topic for this list, but hopefully someone will take pity on me and help out. I have tried googling a bunch of times and either get 10,000 off topic answers or none. 
> 
> When using /etc/aliases to expand a user group such as
> 
> folks:  me, you, them, us, yall
> 
> this seems to work wonderfully. Unfortunately a little too wonderfully.
> 
> What is the easiest (if any) way to restrict this alias group to
> 
> 1) folks on the same subnet (internal use only) - localhost/etc
> or
> 2) folks at least claiming to be of a certain domain (mydomain.com)
> 
> I have found that if we fail to BCC the sent mail, then the spammers pick up the group name and then their junk gets replicated with great efficiency. The restrictions would try to help reduce the junk mail.
> 
> Thank you in advance,
> 
> Bill Watson