INSTALL.alias.md (2050B)
1 qmail lets each user control all addresses of the form user-anything. 2 Addresses that don't start with a username are controlled by a special 3 user, alias. Delivery instructions for foo go into ~alias/.qmail-foo; 4 delivery instructions for user-foo go into ~user/.qmail-foo. See 5 dot-qmail.0 for the full story. 6 7 qmail doesn't have any built-in support for /etc/aliases. If you have a 8 big /etc/aliases and you'd like to keep it, install the fastforward 9 package, available separately. /etc/aliases should already include the 10 aliases discussed below -- Postmaster, MAILER-DAEMON, and root. 11 12 If you don't have a big /etc/aliases, you'll find it easier to use 13 qmail's native alias mechanism. Here's a checklist of aliases you should 14 set up right now. 15 16 * Postmaster. You're not an Internet citizen if this address doesn't 17 work. Simply touch (and chmod 644) ~alias/.qmail-postmaster; any mail 18 for Postmaster will be delivered to ~alias/Mailbox. 19 20 * MAILER-DAEMON. Not required, but users sometimes respond to bounce 21 messages. Touch (and chmod 644) ~alias/.qmail-mailer-daemon. 22 23 * root. Under qmail, root never receives mail. Your system may generate 24 mail messages to root every night; if you don't have an alias for root, 25 those messages will bounce. (They'll end up double-bouncing to the 26 postmaster.) Set up an alias for root in ~alias/.qmail-root. .qmail 27 files are similar to .forward files, but beware that they are strictly 28 line-oriented -- see dot-qmail.0 for details. 29 30 * Other non-user accounts. Under qmail, non-user accounts don't get 31 mail; "user" means a non-root account that owns ~account. Set up 32 aliases for any non-user accounts that normally receive mail. 33 34 Note that special accounts such as ftp, www, and uucp should always have 35 home directories owned by root. 36 37 * Default. If you want, you can touch ~alias/.qmail-default to catch 38 everything else. Beware: this will also catch typos and other addresses 39 that should probably be bounced instead. It won't catch addresses that 40 start with a user name -- the user can set up his own ~/.qmail-default.