Technical Note - Email Forwarding and Automatic Reply

Summary

This document details how you can enable forwarding of your email to another account, or how to create an autoresponder for your address.

Details

Email Forwarding

Email forwarding to a single remote address is easily accomplished using the Mail Forwarding System.

Email autoresponder / Vacation response

Email automatic responding is easily setup using our Automatic Response System.

A known problem with this system is that once you create an automatic response, you cannot alter the message even though although the system will appear to let you. In order to edit your message, you must cancel the existing autoresponse, then wait for five minutes (to make sure the cancelation has actually taken effect) and then create a new autoresponse. This is a bug, not a feature. Unfortunately it is one that is tricky to fix and so far it hasn't had a high enough priority on the todo list!

Complex Setups

The automatic systems described above only provide simple mail handling functionality. If you want more complex functionality (for eg: forwarding of or autoreplying to only selected messages, sorting incoming messages into folders, etc) you will have to create this yourself. You can do this by editing the .forward file in your toplevel directory so that it invokes whatever program(s) you want to process your email. Programs that are commonly invoked from .forward include procmail and vacation.

Building your own mail handling system can be tricky and it is quite easy to lose incoming email. We do not recommend you do this unless you are confident you know what you are doing!