| FORWARD(5) | File Formats Manual | FORWARD(5) |
forward — email
forwarding information file
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 it 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.
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"
| March 13, 2015 | OpenBSD-current |