sSMTP revaliases, aliases and mail.rc

      16 Comments on 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

16 thoughts on “sSMTP revaliases, aliases and mail.rc

  1. Pingback: sSMTP aliases | Записки Плюшевого Крыса

  2. Pingback: Using ssmtp on CentOS « mbrownnyc

  3. avatarjohn

    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 ?

  4. avatarRaftaMan

    @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.

  5. avatarPlato

    Nice posting. Thanks.

    i am able to use ssmtp to send email (from cron ) to a mail address somewhere on the internet.
    Now I want to receive the mail from cron in my local mail folder, I think it is /var/mail/plato on Debian, and read it with a mail client like mutt.
    So far I did not succeed. Any ideas on how to accomplish that?
    Thanks,
    Plato

  6. Pingback: ssmtp sends To ‘root’ instead To my email – Internet and Tecnnology Answers for Geeks

  7. Pingback: ssmtp root alias doesn’t work – Internet and Tecnnology Answers for Geeks

  8. avatarAnonymous

    Thank you so much for explaining the aliasing with mail! Was banging my head onto the table as to why the aliases file is not respected.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.