Mail Aliases and Status Mail

Every OpenBSD system runs maintenance tasks daily, weekly, and monthly, and sends email messages with the results to the local root account. I discuss these maintenance jobs in Chapter 15. If you have more than a couple of servers, you should probably forward these email messages to a single central account.

The OpenBSD system redirects email messages addressed to local users to other users or remote email addresses, as configured in /etc/mail/aliases. Here are a few entries:

…
# Basic system aliases -- these MUST be present
MAILER-DAEMON: postmaster
postmaster: root
…

The original recipient appears on the left, followed by a colon, and a list of people to forward the messages to. If you have multiple recipients separate them with commas. Mail addressed to MAILER-DAEMON on the local system is forwarded to the postmaster account, which, in turn, is forwarded to the root account.

You should create an alias for root, directing mail sent to root to your systems administration team:

root: [email protected], [email protected]

After changing /etc/mail/aliases, run newaliases(8) to update email forwarding.