Mark writes:
From: Dick St.Peters [mailto:stpeters(_at_)NetHeaven(_dot_)com]
That "entire" alias db is rebuilt by sendmail every time it starts up
anyway.
I surely hope not. :)
Actually, the behavior is determined by:
O AutoRebuildAliases=bool configuration file
define(`confAUTO_REBUILD',bool) m4 configuration
Actually, we're both wrong. I had forgotten that on my systems the
alias database is rebuilt on sendmail daemon startup by
/etc/init.d/sendmail, not by sendmail itself.
As for the AutoRebuildAliases option, quoting from sendmail's
RELEASE_NOTES:
8.12.0/8.12.0 2001/09/08
....
Remove AutoRebuildAliases option, deprecated since 8.10
Presumably it was deprecated and then removed for the reasons you cite
about rebuilding on every non-daemon sendmail startup.
One big advantage to using aliases is that the "user" part
of a forwarded address doesn't have to be an actual user.
Nobody disputes the advantages of the aliases file, of course. But
pointing an alias to a valid local user, which user has a .forward file,
would accomplish the same and avoid having to rig sendmail in such a
fashion that it is forced to rebuild its aliases database all the time
(including, I premuse, in your case, a forced rebuilt every time a user
changes his or her forwarding address). You are trying to use something
dynamically which was clearly meant to be used statically. Like so many
ill-advised things, it can be done, of course; but ...
I would say that the one-time presence of an AutoRebuildAliases option
shows that aliases were not intended for only static, stable data.
More importantly, not long ago having a large number of users meant
having multiple disks disks spread across multiple file servers.
Having a big group of users' mail forwarding fail because their
directories were on a file server that was down was a quick lesson in
why relying on .forward files was what was ill-advised. It still is
if you have NFS-mounted user directories.
None of this has any relevance to SPF though. It matters that a lot
of mail is forwarded. How that is accomplished doesn't matter, only
the envelope addressing does.
--
Dick St.Peters, stpeters(_at_)NetHeaven(_dot_)com
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