Installing and Administering Internet Services

170 Chapter4
Installing and Administering sendmail
Creating sendmail Aliases
Forwarding Your Own Mail with a .forward File
You can redirect your own mail by creating a .forward file in your home
directory. If a .forward file exists in your home directory and is owned
by you, sendmail will redirect mail addressed to you to the addresses in
the .forward file.
A .forward file can contain anything that can appear on the right side of
an alias definition, including programs and files. (See Table 4-1 earlier in
this chapter.) Following is an example of a .forward file owned by user
alice on host chicago:
alice@miami, alice@toronto, \alice, mycrew
Mail sent to alice@chicago will be delivered to alice’s accounts on
hosts miami and toronto as well as to her account on local host chicago.
It will also be delivered to all the recipients of the mailing list mycrew,
which must be defined in the local aliases databaseor in an :include file
on host chicago.
The aliases database is read before a .forward file. The .forward file is
read only if the user’s name is not defined as an alias or if an alias
expands to the user’s name.