Sendmail, 3rd Edition

The Aliases Database

Reading the aliases file every time sendmail begins to run can slow mail delivery and create a lot of unnecessary computational overhead. To improve efficiency, sendmail has the ability to store aliases in a separate database format on disk. In this format, sendmail rarely needs to read the aliases file. Instead, it merely opens the database and performs lookups as necessary.

The sendmail program builds its database files by reading the aliases(5) file and rewriting that file in database format. Usually, the aliases file is called aliases. With that name, ndbm(3) database files are called aliases.pag and aliases.dir, and the db(5) database file is called aliases.db.

The sendmail program offers several forms of database, one of which is chosen at compile time (see confMAPDEF).

Rebuild the Alias Database

You tell sendmail to rebuild its database files by running it in -bi mode. This mode can be executed in two different ways:

% newaliases
%/usr/sbin/sendmail -bi

The first form is shorthand for the second. Either causes sendmail to rebuild those files. If the database is successfully built, sendmail prints a single line:

895 aliases, longest 565 bytes, 30444 bytes total

This shows that 895 entries appeared to the left of colons in the aliases file. The longest list of addresses to the right of a colon was 565 bytes (excluding the newline). And there were 30,444 total bytes of noncomment information in the file.

V8 sendmail supports multiple alias database files (see ...