Sendmail masquerade outgoing email address

by nixCraft on November 2, 2006 · 17 comments· LAST UPDATED November 2, 2006

If you just need an outgoing email from web server use sendmail. But what is masquerading?

With the help of masquerading your outgoing email appers from user@cyberciti.biz instead of realunixuser@server01.cyberciti.biz. This will also hide your internal user name or host name from rest of the world.

So this feature rewrites the hostname in the address of outgoing mail. This is also used when you have centralized mail server i.e. mail hub.

Sendmail masquerading configuration

Open your sendmail config file /etc/mail/sendmail.mc:
# vi /etc/mail/sendmail.mc
Append/add/modify the lines as follows:
MASQUERADE_AS(cyberciti.biz)dnl FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl FEATURE(masquerade_entire_domain)dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(cyberciti.biz)dnl
Save and close the file. Replace domain name cyberciti.biz with your actual domain name. Update and restat sendmail server:
# m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf # /etc/init.d/sendmail restart

I did try to use the virtusertable file but it didn’t to work for outgoing email. The problem I am trying to solve is EXACTLY the on you mention in your post: I have a machine (prod1) and a user (prod) and I want to send emails as invitation@.com (I am just interested in outgoing email… and no, I am not a spammer :-)

The masquerade works for the domain name, but for the user, I ended up having to create a unix user ‘invitation’ on my box and sudo to invitation before sending the emails… It works fine but I am sure there is a better/simpler way…

Thanks for your reply btw.
-Didier

4 ifti February 16, 2009 at 5:58 am

i m facing the same problem as mentioned by didier , actually i have set a linux monitoring server which monitors network devices,if any device is down it sends emails on our local domain using sendmail, the outgoing mails are sent from this server like root@localhos.localdomain i want to masquerade it to say test@xyz.com, nix and didier any help will be highly appreciable….
thanks

5 Mrmartin February 17, 2010 at 6:36 pm

Great, simple article, how would the masquerading work if I’m using Apache virtual hosts ie more than 1 domain on the server. If a php app from one virtual host sends mail using the PHP mail() function how do I set which from address is used?

Thanks

6 Shai May 11, 2010 at 7:19 am

Make sure that you have placed the above 4 lines above the MAILER lines at the end or you’ll get an error when issuing the m4 cmd from cli

7 josh from america May 11, 2010 at 7:01 pm

sendmail totally ignores all changes related to masquerade, also know as:

“does not work”, or “tutorial non- helpfull”

8 J James May 18, 2010 at 8:24 pm

One more thing needs to done, if sending mail as root
#C{E}root – comment out

9 Anon July 7, 2010 at 10:11 am

To allow root to masquerade (eg: for logwatch) in sendmail.mc change:

EXPOSED_USER(`root’)dnl

dnl EXPOSED_USER(`root’)dnl

This command bypasses masquerading for the root user, which makes it very confusing when testing this from the root account.

10 vmunix August 12, 2010 at 5:21 pm

The article does not mention how to masquerade the username.

11 ipkwena September 14, 2010 at 7:11 pm

Thanks for the article. Now I have managed to have my Linux box send out emails. However, I have not resolved masquerading the user name. There must be a tutorial somewhere.

Regards.

12 Salam November 7, 2010 at 7:45 pm

I followed all instructions, added the 4 lines, added an alias to my root in usersgeeneric table
root myemail@mydomain.com

Note : I already have the following 4 lines in my sendamail.cf
dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(localhost)dnl
dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(localhost.localdomain)dnl
dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(mydomainalias.com)dnl
dnl MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(mydomain.lan)dnl

which I didnt touch.
Whenever I issue the following command
echo “hello worls” | mail -s “Firstmail” myscondemail@anotherdoamin.fr

I get right away an email for root indicating :

The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–

(reason: 550 5.1.8 your MAIL FROM is refused for this recipient : 553 sorry, your envelope sender domain must exist (#5.7.1))

13 Josh from America April 6, 2011 at 8:08 pm

This absolutely does not work, in any capacity whatsoever.

14 jeffrey smith June 21, 2011 at 3:59 pm

I managed to get this working by doing the following.

change you /etc/hosts file so the first entry with a . for 127.0.01 is the domain your trying to masquerade i.e

127.0.0.1 server1 server1.domain.com server1.domain.local

Then chnage the entries so they are.

MASQUERADE_AS(domain.com)dnl
FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl
FEATURE(masquerade_entire_domain)dnl
MASQUERADE_DOMAIN(localhost)dnl

As stated above this only works for non root users.

15 Habib Mumin January 2, 2012 at 6:21 pm: To allow user root to send email and use masquerade domain, in sendmail.cf the line beginning
C{E}root
remove word ‘root’ and you have
C{E}
restart sendmail as per above instructions.
There is no need to edit hosts file.
Reply

16 Sandeep February 3, 2012 at 6:35 am

Hi Vivek,
Small query about out going mails.
I would like to add some disclaimer message for every outgoing mail form our mail server. Can you please suggest me the best way to do this?

Thanks,
Sandeep.

17 RCRON July 27, 2012 at 12:06 am