/etc/aliases - problem. very weird. need help!

[Guest_imported]

i am running sendmail 8.9.3...rh 6.2....the normal setup. there should be nothing to complicated about this. however, when placing more than one email address for a user in /etc/aliases ...

egessner: egessner@mac.com, eric@matrix49.com

i can place 5 addresses here, but i will only get mail to the first address. i have tried making a list with the :include: directive, i have tried a .forward file..and all respond the same way.

no here's the weird part. the above happens when i send mail to the box from a mail client. if i send mail as a local user at the command line...'mail egessner'...ya-da, ya-da....all addresses listed will receive the mail.

now obviously, the issue has something to do with sendmail giving special privileges to local compared to smtp.....but what is the deal? i have searched endlessly on forums and sendmail's site. to no avial. nothing. is anyone having this problem??? AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

this is a local box, running DNS....

http://www.internal.cxm

and your typical reserved IP class....192.168.0.254
i'm getting that typical error you get with the hostname when building the aliases file. `newaliases`. warning. local hostname is not qualified. but logically that should not affect the SMTP part, where my problem seems to lie. other than that.....i've fiddle, i've tweaked.....i can find no theme......beyond the SMTP/local discrimination.

nothing unsual...as a matter of fact....i reloaded the freakin box...to a default RH 6.2 install. this is driving me insane! i can't find anyone who is experiencing these problems.

any help would be greatly appreciated!! thanks!......EG

 

[tangodave]

I'm not sure how much this will help, but I'll try.

The error you are getting with newaliases can probably be cleaned up by putting both the short name and the fully qualified name in your /etc/hosts file for your local server. Sendmail, in my experience, can be very picky about resolving the name of it's own host.

Have you looked at your mail log file? It should have a clue as to what is and isn't happening.

As for the alias list itself: It looks like you have spaces in there. I've not seen that before, and I'm not sure that it is wrong. Otherwise, the alias file look correct.

Dave

 

[redsevens]

This is a quick-and-dirty type solution, but should get the problem solved while you look into a more proper solution:
Say the alias is egessner and you want to send the file to egessner@host1.com, egessner@host2.com, egessner@host3.com, egessner@host4.com, and egessner@host5.com. You might try to "daisy-chain" the aliases together, like so:

egessner: chain1, egessner@host1.com
chain1: chain2, chain3
chain2: egessner@host2.com, egessner@host3.com
chain3: egessner@host4.com, egessner@host5.com

Again, this is a quick-and-dirty solution, but if the only problem is it ignores everything after the first two addresses, this will accomodate that until you can fix the underlying problem. My sendmail has a few daisy-chains like this (webmaster points to joe, abuse points to webmaster) and they work on my machine (which is also RH6.2). As to the cause of the problem, I don't have a clue!