SMM:08-88
Sendmail Installation and Operation Guide
fullname
The full name of the user.
office-address
The office address for this user.
office-phone
The office phone number for this user.
office-fax
The office FAX number for this user.
home-address
The home address for this user.
home-phone
The home phone number for this user.
home-fax
The home FAX number for this user.
project
A (short) description of the project this person is affiliated with. In the Uni-
versity this is often just the name of their graduate advisor.
plan
A pointer to a file from which plan information can be gathered.
As of this writing, only a few of these fields are actually being used by sendmail: mail-
drop and mailname. A finger program that uses the other fields is planned.
5.12.2. User database semantics
When the rewriting rules submit an address to the local mailer, the user name is passed
through the alias file. If no alias is found (or if the alias points back to the same address), the
name (with ":maildrop" appended) is then used as a key in the user database. If no match
occurs (or if the maildrop points at the same address), forwarding is tried.
If the first token of the user name returned by ruleset 0 is an "@" sign, the user database
lookup is skipped. The intent is that the user database will act as a set of defaults for a cluster
(in our case, the Computer Science Division); mail sent to a specific machine should ignore
these defaults.
When mail is sent, the name of the sending user is looked up in the database. If that user
has a "mailname" record, the value of that record is used as their outgoing name. For example, I
might have a record:
eric:mailname Eric.Allman@CS.Berkeley.EDU
This would cause my outgoing mail to be sent as Eric.Allman.
If a "maildrop" is found for the user, but no corresponding "mailname" record exists, the
record ":default:mailname" is consulted. If present, this is the name of a host to override the
local host. For example, in our case we would set it to "CS.Berkeley.EDU". The effect is that
anyone known in the database gets their outgoing mail stamped as "user@CS.Berkeley.EDU",
but people not listed in the database use the local hostname.
5.12.3. Creating the database
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The user database is built from a text file using the makemap utility (in the distribution in
the makemap subdirectory). The text file is a series of lines corresponding to userdb records;
each line has a key and a value separated by white space. The key is always in the format
described above -- for example:
eric:maildrop
This file is normally installed in a system directory; for example, it might be called
/etc/mail/userdb. To make the database version of the map, run the program:
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These instructions are known to be incomplete. Other features are available which provide similar functionality, e.g., virtual
hosting and mapping local addresses into a generic form as explained in cf/README.