Up: Math 696
Here is some information about how to set up a UNIX account to forward mail automatically to another account. These instructions are part of the course Mathematical Communcation and Technology in the Department of Mathematics at Texas A&M University.
Suppose, for example, that you have an account on tam2000 that
you hardly ever use.
You would like mail that arrives at tam2000 to be forwarded
automatically to your preferred Internet address, where you read
mail frequently. To arrange this, log in to tam2000 and create a
file named .forward (that name starts with a period)
containing the forwarding address. For example, my
.forward file on tam2000 contains the single line
boas@tamu.edu.
Now you have to make sure that the mailer daemon can read
your .forward file. At a command prompt, execute the
command chmod a+r .forward to change the permissions
mode of the file .forward to universal read access.
You can test your set-up by having a friend send mail to you at
tam2000 to see if it gets forwarded properly.
There are fancier possibilities. For example, suppose that
you want mail arriving at your calclab account to be
forwarded to your math.tamu.edu account, but you
want a copy of the mail to stay behind at calclab. I
do this for myself by creating a .forward file on
the calclab machine with the line
\boas,boas@tamu.edu (that initial
\boas is the instruction to leave a copy of the mail
behind when forwarding to the other address). You would do
something similar, but replace \boas with
\your-user-name.
Be cautious with automatic mail forwarding between different machines. You do not want to create an infinite loop that bounces mail back and forth!
Up: Math 696
Comments to Harold P. Boas.
Created Sep 1995.