E-Mail Aliases

Your Virtual Private Server allows you to create E-mail aliases which will forward E-mail messages either to a real local user or to remote E-mail accounts. This allows you to create handy replacements for long or difficult-to-remember E-mail addresses, forward messages to multiple recipients, or create generic 'title' based E-mail addresses (such as abuse@yourcompany.com and webmaster@yourcompany.com). You can also forward the messages to a program, such as an E-mail autoresponder.

E-mail aliases apply only to the username part of an E-mail address. This means that the domain portion of the recipient address is ignored. If you want to use domain-based E-mail forwarding, try using the E-mail Virtmaps feature of your Virtual Private Server.

Creating E-mail Aliases

A list of the E-mail aliases on your Virtual Private Server is stored in the ~/etc/aliases file. You can your aliases by editing the /etc/aliases file online (using SSH or Telnet), or using iManager.

An alias will look something like this:

aliasname: recipient@yourcompany.com

The important element is an alias name, the colon (:), and the recipient address.

The alias name can be just about anything, as long as it doesn't include a reserved character (such as the @ symbol, spaces, etc.).

The recipient name can be another alias, a local user, a remote user, a list of users, or a program. The following examples demonstrate a few possible aliases you could use.

• A single alias:

  webmaster: you@your-isp.com

• A single alias to multiple recipients:

  webmaster: you@your-isp.com, someone@YOUR-DOMAIN.NAME

• An alias to a file containing a list of recipients (one recipient per line)

  listname: :include: /path/to/file

• An alias that calls a program (in this case, autoreply).

  info: YOU@YOUR.ISP, "|/usr/bin/autoreply -f info-reply -a info"

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

Once you have set up your aliases the way you want them, you will need to run the vnewaliases command to create a database file that sendmail can use.

% vnewaliases

Removing Aliases

To remove an alias from your Virtual Private Server, simply remove the alias from the ~/etc/aliases file and run vnewaliases.