Changing default from e-mail address for system accounts when using sendmail

Question

I would like certain system accounts (root and www-data) to have the header From: Example Company <[email protected]> when e-mail is sent using either the mail or sendmail commands, or from programming languages like PHP (which just uses a sendmail wrapper).

I would prefer not to have to add the -f and -F options every time I invoke one of these commands. Is there any way to configure this specifically for these accounts?

Operating system is Debian 7.2.

Solution 1

I ran into this recently.

You can change the address with the generic maps as davidgo mentioned.

In /etc/postfix/main.cf

Add this line

smtp_generic_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/generic

And then in /etc/postfix/generic
Add the line for the originating email address, and the email address you want it to appear to be from

[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]

and then run the following postmap command to re-generate the map:

 postmap /etc/postfix/generic

To make the user appear to be Example Company you need to set the GECOS field in /etc/passwd for root and www-data to be Example Company

Solution 2

As you are actually using Postfix (The sendmail binary is actually Postfix), You can probably change the from adress this by adding a "smtp_generic_maps" file and mapping for the relevant addresses or using canonical_maps to do something similar. I don't think you will be able to change the associated account name (ie the part in the square brackets) without massive hoops but I could be wrong.

Comments

[davidgo]

Are you sure you are using "Sendmail" as your MTA and not postfix or some other drop-in replacement with the name "sendmail" ?

[DanielGibbs]

The MTA is postfix, but the sendmail executable is not symlinked to anything.