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.
- ~/.forward
- Email forwarding information.
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"
aliases(5),
smtpd(8)
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