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Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology
Old Dominion University
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How do automatically forward incoming e-mails to the other e-mail address(es)?


  
In an era of everybody doing "e-mail," it is a common situation that you may end up with more than one e-mail address. Nothing wrong with that, however individually accessing and synchronizing multiple e-mail accounts could cause a havoc to your sanity.

If you want to make all other e-mail accounts automatically forward incoming e-mails to a single e-mail account of your preference, i.e., the "point of contact" or "consolidated" e-mail account, ".forward" file is the answer.

When new e-mail arrives for you, standard e-mail agent, normally "sendmail" command issued by SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol), will automatically check whether you have a ".forward" in your home directory (~/.forward). If you have one, then before delivering mail to your inbox, it will check the contents of the .forward file for instruction(s), and redirect to a forwarding address right away.

This ".forward" file is a simple ASCII text file that you can create using any text editor (such as vi, emacs, pico, dtpad, nedit, and so forth). Inside of ".forward" file, you can put one or more e-mail addresses, each of which is sent a copy of the your incoming e-mail. Make it sure that ".forward" file has global read permission (at least permission level of 644).

Let's say that I have another e-mail account [in addition to CEE unix account] with user name of "jyoon" in xyz.org. To automatically forward all future incoming e-mails to my CEE Unix account to "jyoon@xyz.org," I can create a ".forward" file in my home directory [if there is no ".forward" file exists] containing;

jyoon@xyz.org

That's it, as soon as you save this ".forward" file, any incoming e-mail(s) to your CEE Unix account will automatically forward to "jyoon@xyz.org," period.

I can also forward incoming e-mail(s) to multiple addresses [I don't see any reason why...] by adding them in ".forward" file;

jyoon@xyz.org
jyoon@abc.edu
jyoon@123.com
.
.
.

It will also work the other way around. If you want to autoforward all your e-mails from other e-mail accounts to CEE Unix account, create ".forward" file at your other e-mail accounts' home directory.

If you no longer want to autoforward, simply remane ".forward" file to something else, or delete it. Change will take effect instantly.


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