sSMTP revaliases, aliases and mail.rc
I already wrote about sending mails with ssmtp, a simple alternative to sendmail. But since I got a few questions (and I tend to forget myself) how to use ssmtp’s revaliases-file, here is a short reminder:
/etc/revaliases, allows you to map a local user to a specific ‘From:’ address on outbound mail and to route that mail through a specific mailhub. But it will not rewrite the ‘To:’ address according to the local user who should receive the mail.
Usually, you would add aliases to /etc/aliases to ensure that a local user (receiving a mail) is mapped to a valid eMail address. But as the documentation clearly says (if you actually read it), ssmtp does not use /etc/aliases.
The solution turns out to be letting mail handle the alias – which is done by configuring aliases in /etc/mail.rc
set ask askcc append dot save crt ignore Received Message-Id Resent-Message-Id Status Mail-From Return-Path Via Delivered-To alias root root<yourname@domain.com> alias localuser localuser<yourname@domain.com>
You can test it with with:
# echo test | mail -s "testing ssmtp" localuser
The mail will actually be delivered to yourname@domain.com (since ‘localuser’ is mapped to this address in /etc/mail.rc).
Enjoy!
Resources:
http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/132006
http://greybeardedgeek.net/?p=17
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
This is great little tutorial and helped me out no-end. Good work!
exactly what i was looking for. I still cant get mine to work, the TO: emails are still going to my hostname eg localhost@ubuntupc
how do you get the mail.rc file? do you just create it yourself and ssmtp automatically recognises it ?
@john
ssmtp doesn’t care about the mail.rc afaik, but if you send your eMail through “mail” (see the example above) it uses the alias set in mail.rc with the MTA you set up.
Note that /bin/mail is just a link to /bin/mailx on Fedora.