UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Is there any way of creating a 'catchall' or a default account that all undelivered mail can go to ?

eg if we have 3 user accounts (user1, user2, admin) already set up, but someone sends an email to user3@mydomain.com, can sendmail figure out that it doesn't match any existing users and deliver it to admin@mydomain.com ?

Thanks,
Ash

Actually, if someone sent email to user3 then sendmail should respond back to the sender that the user does not exist. You should not want all the junk mail to be delivered to another account (especially since spam mail could flood that mailbox with stuff!).

You should have postmaster@yourdomainname.xxx set up to get email that could not be ( delivered and is returned, errored due to space on receiving server, any number of errors....).

If you really want to keep all the junk that everyone may send, you could possibly put in an alias that would do it. Not recommended.

Good point. It was my manager's idea ... we have a high staff turnover so there's plenty of closed accounts still getting mail from our customers.

It's to stop our customers from getting 'mailbox not found' messages and thinking the company's gone under

All the mail's gonna go to him anyway ... ... do you know how I would set up this default alias ?

if they are valid accounts that you dont want to remove from the system.

put a .forward file in each of the users home dir. inside this .forward file would be 1 and only 1 email adress you want that users email to goto.

My idea was simply to point the old alias at another user, from within the 'aliases' file, but my manager's decided that we must be losing out on lots of sales from people emailling different accounts. We've got everything normal set up (sales, enquiries, webmaster, nobody, manager etc etc) ...

If it's not a simple thing like adding "default" then I'll just tell him it can't be done. LOL

First - update your resume.
Second - Explain to him again that the reason folks get 'mailbox not found' messages is because the person/account is no longer there. This is normal and should not be changed - the thing that SHOULD be changed is where customers send email.

Setting up email addresses such as ourIBMcustomer and pointing that to the appropriate group of folks that can answer these emails.

So one of your customers wants to send an email to a person or a group of folks at your company for information. The customer gets an email address from your company such as ourIBMcustomer@yourdomain.com. In your sendmail server (You did not post the OS - I'll give example of Solaris and Sendmail) in /etc/mail/alias file put the following entry

ourIBMcustomer: myboss, myaccount, personabouttoleave

So any mail coming in for ourIBMcustomer would go to your boss, you, and the person about to leave your company.

Then you run the newaliases command and now any email coming in for ourIBMcustomer goes to those folks. When the person does leave, you remove personabouttoleave from that line, save the alias file, and run the newaliases command again.
Now the email only goes to you and your boss (or you can add another new account). You have to teach your customers that if they want a response from email, they must send to the account set up for their company (or accounts - you can have many).

The headache is keeping up with it - hopefully you know when folks are leaving - another thing you can do is for the person who just left the company is set up an alias to send any of their email to their boss.

john.doe: jane.doe

Any email coming in for john.doe would now go to jane.doe (after the newaliases command is run).

Or a .forward file could be put into the currently gone user's home directory to forward all email to someone else. Locking the account would not effect email deliver but would be needed to insure the ex-employee did not get into your servers via that account.

If you still want to mess around with sending all email to your boss, you would have to edit the sendmail.cf file and redirect email that fails to have a valid receipent to send him the message - a wildcard alias would not work since he would get ALL email - not just invalid email.

You should add a line in your /etc/mail/virtusertable like this:

@yourdomain.com catchallaccount


After makemaping the virtusertable file all the mails with no owner will go to catchallaccount. It does not matter that catchallaccount is a real account or not. Anyway, the bad thing is spam mails. All the mails with fake "To:" field also will go that users mailbox. I hope, it will help...