limit in aliases file

[Fred Martin_1]

Is there a limit, either in bytes or in number of addresses, to a single alias in the file /etc/aliases?

I've got an alias with 148 names in it, and it works OK, just want to know how large it can get.

[Christopher Caldwell · Accepted solution]

Rather than listing addresses in the aliases file like
test: a@a.com,b@b.com,c@c.com,d@d.com,e@e.com

we use something like
test: : include:/path/to/your/list

where list contains each e-mail address, one per line. With this approach, I'm yet to find a practical limit to the number of folks appearing in an alias (I'm in the thousands now).

Be careful who you advertise "test" to so you don't have people doing unfriendly things like spamming. You can use front-ends processors like majordomo for open lists - we call sendmail directly for closed lists.

Sorting [list] by e-mail in domain order will optimize the rate that modern sendmail will transmit message, since sendmail won't have to initiate a connection sequence if it's already connected to [domain], and sendmail will deliver messages to blocks of users per iteration if the users are at the same [domain].

[Fred Martin_1]

Thanks. I doubt that this particular alias will have more than 400 names, ever. If anyone has an entry in an /etc/mail/aliases file with more than that, let me know. If I run into trouble though, I'll use the include.