NAME
forward —
email forwarding information
file
DESCRIPTION
Users may put a .forward file in their
home directory. If this file exists,
smtpd(8) forwards email to the destinations specified therein.
A .forward file contains a list of
expansion values, as described in
aliases(5). Each expansion value should be on a line by itself.
However, the .forward mechanism differs from the
aliases mechanism in that is disallows file inclusion (:include:) and it
performs expansion under the user ID of the .forward
file owner.
Permissions on the .forward file are very
strict and expansion is rejected if the file is group or world-writable; if
the home directory is group writeable; or if the file is not owned by the
user.
Users should avoid editing directly the
.forward file to prevent delivery failures from
occurring if a message arrives while the file is not fully written. The best
option is to use a temporary file and use the
mv(1)
command to atomically overwrite the former .forward.
Alternatively, setting the
sticky(8) bit on the home directory will cause the
.forward lookup to return a temporary failure,
causing mails to be deferred.
FILES
- ~/.forward
- Email forwarding information.
EXAMPLES
The following file forwards mail to “user@example.com”, and pipes the same mail to “examplemda”.
# empty lines are ignored user@example.com # anything after # is ignored "|/path/to/examplemda"