masqmail.aliases(5)

📦 version 0.3.4, in ubuntu jammy

✨ masqmail.aliases — the alias file format, bestie edition ✨

okay so this is the manual page for masqmail.aliases, aka the masqmail alias file format 💌 and yes it's a "file formats" kind of page, we love a format moment.

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

This page describes the format of the masqmail alias file. Its usual location is /etc/aliases — that's where you'll normally find it, no cap. 🎀

🦋 FILE FORMAT 🦋

The alias file is made of lines that look like this:

local_part: item1, item2, ...

Items can be wrapped in double quotes ". And if, inside those quotes, you need more quotes for an address? You escape them with a leading backslash \. 💅

  • A leading backslash \ says: do NOT expand this address any further. Like, hands off, it's staying exactly as it is.
  • A leading pipe symbol | says: treat this item as a pipe command. The content of the message gets sent to the standard input of that command. 🫶 The command runs under the user id and group id that masqmail is running as. And heads up — if quotes are needed, the pipe symbol must appear within the quotes.
  • Loops? Detected. 🚨 The offending address gets ignored, we don't do infinite spirals here.
Big one: aliases are expanded at delivery time. So if there's a message still sitting in the queue and you change an alias that matches one of the recipient addresses, that change takes effect the next time a delivery is attempted. ⏳

And the best part, fr fr: there is no need to restart masqmail or run any command when the alias file has been changed. Change it, and it's just… live. iconic behavior honestly 👑

🌈 EXAMPLE 🌈

# postmaster is required by RFC 2821
postmaster: root

# forward abuse mail to another address
abuse: abuse@example.org

# copy root's mail also to meillo
root: \root, meillo

# pass mail to a script
foo: |/usr/bin/foo

💖 AUTHOR 💖

Masqmail was written by Oliver Kurth. It is now maintained by Markus Schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>. 🫶

You will find the newest version of masqmail at http://marmaro.de/prog/masqmail/. There's also a mailing list — you'll find info about it at masqmail's main site. ✨

💀 BUGS 💀

Please report bugs to the mailing list. (not to me, I'm just the messenger 🙈)

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

and that's the whole vibe, bestie 💅 this was masqmail-0.3.4, dated 2012-01-18 — thank you for coming to my ted talk, mwah 🎀💖✨

📦 where this page comes from