Defining a Mailing List Owner
Notification of an error in delivery to a mailing list is sent to the original sender as bounced mail. Although this behavior is desirable for most mail delivery, it can have undesirable results for mailing lists. Because the list is maintained locally, it does not make sense for an error message to be sent to a remote sender. That sender is likely to be puzzled or upset and unable to fix the problem. A better solution is to force all error messages to be sent to a local user, regardless of who sent the original message.
When sendmail processes errors during delivery,
it looks to see whether an “owner”
was defined for the mailing list. If one was defined, errors are sent
to that owner rather than to the sender. The owner is defined by
prefixing the original mailing list alias with the phrase
owner-
, as shown in the following aliases file
fragment:
nuts: :include:/home/lists/nuts.list owner-nuts: george
Here, nuts
is the name of the mailing list. If an
error occurs in attempting delivery to the list of recipients in the
file /home/lists/book.list
,
sendmail looks for an alias called
owner-nuts
(the original name prefixed with
owner-
). If sendmail finds an
owner (here, george
), it sends error notification
to that owner rather than to the original sender. Generally, it is
best to have the owner-
of a list be the same as
the owner of the mailing-list file, because that user is best suited
to correct errors as they appear.
To ensure that all errors in mailing ...
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