sendmail, 4th Edition

-d27.1

Trace aliasing Debug command-line switch

The -d27.1 (a.k.a. -d27) debugging switch causes sendmail to print each step it takes when processing local addresses through aliasing. First, sendmail prints the addresses being aliased:

alias(addr)

Here, addr is the address (usually a local username) that is about to be aliased. Note that it can already be the result of previous aliasing. If the addr can be aliased, its transformation is printed as:

addr (host, user) aliased to newaddr

Here, addr is the address before aliasing, and the newaddr is the new address that resulted from successful aliasing. The host and user are the hostname and username from the recipient part of the envelope. If the addr cannot be aliased, nothing is printed.

During initialization, if the aliases database cannot be opened, the -d27.1 debugging switch causes sendmail to print:

Can't open aliasfile

Here, aliasfile is the full pathname of the aliases(5) file, as declared by the AliasFile option (AliasFile on page 970) or implied with the service-switch file set by the ServiceSwitchFile option (ServiceSwitchFile on page 1088).

If the failure was due to a faulty map declaration, sendmail logs the following error:

setalias: unknown alias class dbtype

If the map is not allowed to provide alias services, sendmail logs this error:

setalias: map class dbtype can't handle aliases

If sendmail is trying to create a database file and it can’t (usually when it is run with the -bi command-line switch or run as newaliases), the ...