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How To Setup Email Alias In Red Hat Linux

Copyright © Walker 16 Jan 2008 01:22
An email alias is usually setup for redirection or to group a list of email recipients into one “email address” that understand by the email system.
For example, you might want all emails addressed to “apache” being redirected to your personal Gmail account. You could also setup an alias called blog-admin so that all emails sending to blog-admin will be distributed to all blog administrators defined by the alias name (blog-admin).

How to setup an email alias in Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Sendmail system installed?
  1. Login with root user ID
  2. Edit the /etc/aliases file (with vi editor)
  3. Append / change an email alias in this format 
    alias_name:   email_id1 [, email_id2,] ...

    E.g. append this new email alias to the /etc/aliases
    blogadmin:   walkernews@walkernews.net, assist@walkernews.net
  4. Save and exit the alias file
  5. Execute the newaliases command followed by echo $? (suppose there is no error found, you will get a 0 returned by the echo command).
    Alternatively, you can execute the equivalent sendmail -bi command (since this is a Sendmail system)

By now, you should test and confirm the works done so far. E.g. send an email to the email alias:

mail -s "testing with aliases name blogadmin" blogadmin </dev/null

Mission completed if you the email in both inboxes (in this example, these are walkernews@walkernews.net and assist@walkernews.net).


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  2. Daniel August 15th, 2010 2:49 AM

    Thanks man, worked like a charm!
    props up!