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capabilities of a .forward file
25th May 1999 Aseem Asthana @bom4.vsnl.net.in
Hello there, I was wondering if somebody knew what are the full range of capabilities of a .forward file in Unix. I know that it can forward mail from one acct to another automatically but can it also do the following 1. Can it forward to two or more email accts. 2. Auto reply a standard letter. 3. Filtering and Blocking. If anybody can help me I would be very grateful. Thanks, Aseem. Aseem Asthana, 239 A, New Swarg Mandir, Mhow 453441, MP, India. Tele - 91 7324 74603/78236. Fax - (001)(847) 589-3332, ICQ #36888504 Final Yr, B. E., Department of Comp Sc & Engg, Sri Govindram Sekseria Institute of Technology and Science, 23, Park Rd, Indore. MP. India. Alternate Email - [email protected]
25th May 1999
B.G. Mahesh @hotmail.com
>1. Can it forward to two or more email accts. Yes. the format will be [email protected], [email protected] If you want to retain a copy of the email in your account asthana, [email protected], [email protected] >2. Auto reply a standard letter. Usually Unix systems have a program called "vacation". If your system doesn't have procmail can handle it >3. Filtering and Blocking. Procmail will do the magic for you. I am ASSUMING you are talking about Unix systems. If you want to filter/block for the entire system sendmail and qmail have rules that will do it for you. But if you want to do it at a user level then use Procmail. see http://www.procmail.org/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- B.G. Mahesh | http://www.indiainfo.com/ Email: [email protected] | http://www.careerindia.com
26th May 1999
Mital N. Bhatt @ouray.cudenver.edu
Hi Aseem, You can specify forwarding to multiple recipients by using a comma delimited list of recipients in ~/.forward. You can forward the email to an executable for auto replies and mail filtering. To direct an incoming email to an executable, use something similar to "| /path/filename" as one of the recipients in ~/.forward. Substitute the proper path and filename into the above example. For a simple autoresponder, use the UNIX 'vacation' utility. It will ask you to add something like "|/usr/bin/vacation aseem" to your recipient list and also ask you for a vacation message to send. Use that for your auto reply. Check the man page for vacation to get details for your specific implementation. For mail filtering/blocking, you might as well just write a short shell script of your own and forward mail to it. I've seen a perl script for mail filtering on the web somewhere but I can't recall which website. Mital--
26th May 1999
Srinath S @geocities.com
Basically the .forward is meant to forward mails. But with backing mail filters you can do a lot of things with .forward. 1. Forwarding to two or more addresses: Just give the addresses separated by comma in the .forward file. Note, you will NOT get a copy of the mail in your mailbox if you put a forwarding address. For this, you need to provide your mailaddress name preceeded by a backslash. For example, if your login name (which received mails) is xyz, and if you want to forward all your mails to [email protected] as well as retain a copy of them, then your .forward would look something like this-- \xyz,[email protected] 2. Autoreply: Autoreply-- or in fact, *any* kind of mail processing functionality can be achieved by forwarding mails to programs instead of mail addresses. For this, you need to "pipe" the incoming mails into the program, by preceeding the program path with a pipe symbol. Hence, if you want to forward mails to a program called autoreply, which resides in /home/xyz/programs, then your .forward would have an entry like the following-- "|/home/xyz/programs/autoreply" autoreply receives each mail as standard input. You may read the RFC821 (is it the correct number) to know the format of mail headers. But then, you might just as well search www.download.com or www.shareware.com or www.gnu.org for appropriate autoreply scripts that would parse the incoming mails and reply back. Many linux distributions also have autoreply programs as part of one of their packages. Best, Srinath -- Send in your ideas to address challenges of Indian life: http://www.indiapolicy.org/ifi
28th May 1999
Udhay Shankar N @pobox.com
> 1. Can it forward to two or more email accts.
Sure it can -- just enter each address on a separate line.
> 2. Auto reply a standard letter.
> 3. Filtering and Blocking.
For this, you need to edit .procmailrc, the procmail ini file. Most ISPs
do not allow you to do this. If you are running our own Unix box which
picks up your mail for you, then you could. (A virtual domain also would
do -- if you are hosting a domain at some provider, they typically allow
you to do this.)
Udhay
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