Forwarding Mail on UNIX

• On tigger and icarus
• On mailserv
• A better way? ACCC Web-Generated Email Filters

Logon (or login) to the account you want your mail forwarded from, and create a file named .forward in your home directory, and put in it the complete electronic mail address(s) of the account(s) that will receive your mail.

An example .forward file:

rhood1@sherwood.forest

Replace the rhood1@sherwood.forest with the complete mail address of the account(s) that you want to receive your mail. (One email address per line or separated by commas.)

.forward Doesn't and Can't Keep a Copy of the Email for You

If you have a .forward file, the email coming into you account will be delivered only to the email address(es) in the file; it will not also be delivered to your account. And putting your address in the .forward file won't do it -- all you'll end up doing is creating an email loop. (A very bad thing.)

If you want your email to go to your account and somewhere else, you have to use ACCC Web-generated email filters.

You can't login to a mailserv account. The best way to forward email on mailserv is to use ACCC Web-generated email filters.

.forward only redirects email to other accounts. If you want to do anything fancier than that, in particular if you want your email to go to your account and somewhere else, you have to use procmail email filters. There was a time that procmail filters were hard to set up, but the ACCC Email - Filters utility has taken care of that. Select the type of filter you want to create -- anti-spam, vacation notification, attachment, custom -- and follow the instructions. For more information, see the ACCC Email Filters How-To Page.