If an error occurs on sending to a certain address, say x, sendmail will look for an alias of the form owner-x to receive the errors. This is typically useful for a mailing list where the submitter of the list has no control over the maintenance of the list itself; in this case the list maintainer would be the owner of the list. For example:
List owners also cause the envelope sender address to be modified. The contents of the owner alias are used if they point to a single user, otherwise the name of the alias itself is used. For this reason, and to obey Internet conventions, the owner- address normally points at the -request address; this causes messages to go out with the typical Internet convention of using `` list-request'' as the return address.