4.49. How do I enable automatic alias generation with sendmail?

Question: When you use Mailman with the postfix MTA, there are some nice additional tools to automate the generation of the aliases that are required, when you create a new mailing list. Can you do the same with Sendmail?

Answer: Yes. There is the mm-handler method described in the official Mailman Installation documentation at http://www.list.org/mailman-install/node33.html, but not everyone wants to go that shared system-wide route. As one alternative, Ed Greenberg posted a message to the mailman-users mailing list on using the same technique for integration with sendmail as is currently used in integrating with postfix. See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-June/037518.html for details.

Hopefully we'll be able to convince him to upload this patch to SourceForge and get this incorporated into a future version of Mailman.

Tony Lembke has posted some even more detailed instructions at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2007-December/059693.html also now in this FAQ.

Geoff Allen has posted a different approach that uses cron to run Mailman's genaliases and put the result in a sendmail alias file. See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-March/060974.html. Note that the following line was wrapped in the original post. It should be all one line as here.

 /usr/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases | sed -n '5,$p' >/etc/mail/mailman-aliases

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.