I would like to thank everyone who responded, especially:

Aleksandar Milivojevic [alex@srce.hr]

Rich Kulawiec [rsk@gsp.org]

Craig Raskin [raskin@compusec.org]

Mike Jacobi [mike@engg.ksu.edu]

John Bradley [john.bradley@sr5.chinalake.navy.mil]

They all responded with lightning speed. The problem was that the

permissions on the *entire* directory path to the aliases file must *not* be

group writeable, not just the aliases file itself. Additionally, neither

should /var and /var/spool.

Aleksander offered this handy tip:

"One chmod will do the trick:

# chmod go-w / /etc /etc/mail /var /var/spool /var/spool/mqueue

P.S.

Note that some patches will change modes on some of those directories,

making them group writtable, so you'll need to execute above command

after you install new patches..."

Original question:

> Hello gang,

> I am running sendmail 8.8.8 on a sparc 10 with solaris 2.5.1. I am trying

to

> upgrade to sendmail 8.9.0 (for it's anti-spam features), while keeping my

> current sendmail.cf. I compiled sendmail on another (non-production)

machine

> and copied it over to /usr/lib, after making sure that the

/var/spool/mqueue

> was empty. When it is installed and I try to send mail, I receive the

> following error:

>

> dbm map "Alias0": unsafe map file /etc/mail/aliases

---------------------------------

Amanda K. Dahl

Information Services

BARRA, INC.

2100 Milvia Avenue

Berkeley.CA 94704

adahl@barra.com

---------------------------------

"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that

would also stop you from doing clever things." -- Doug Gwyn