FORWARD(5) BSD 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. How‐
ever, 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 deliv‐
ery 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. Alterna‐
tively, setting the sticky(8) bit on the home directory will cause the
.forward lookup to return a temporary failure, causing mails to be
deferred.
~/.forward Email forwarding information.
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"
aliases(5), smtpd(8)
This page is part of the OpenSMTPD (a FREE implementation of the
server-side SMTP protocol) project. Information about the project can
be found at https://www.opensmtpd.org/. If you have a bug report for
this manual page, see ⟨https://github.com/OpenSMTPD/OpenSMTPD/issues⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/OpenSMTPD/OpenSMTPD.git⟩ on 2020-08-13. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the reposi‐
tory was 2020-07-27.) If you discover any rendering problems in this
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BSD March 13, 2015 BSD
Pages that refer to this page: mailaddr(7)