| 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 | Debian |