If you prefer to read your e-mail on a different system, you can easily tell the Unix mailing system to forward all mail sent to your Unix e-mail address to a different address.

You will want to create, in your home directory (i.e., cd ~) a file named “.forward” . The contents of this file should be a single line of text containing your preferred e-mail address.

You can create this file using your favorite text editor, or you can simply use the Unix echo command to write the desired text into the file. For example, if you wanted all your e-mail to be sent to bogus@megacorp.com, you would do the following

The final cat command should show the contents of the .forward file to be your desired address. (Note: Unix files that start with a “.” are invisible to the normal ls command. To see them in a directory listing, you have to add the -a option: ls -a.)

Now, test it out! If you have a bad e-mail address in your .forward file, you could lose messages. So send yourself mail (to your ODU CS account). It should appear, in due course, at your preferred e-mail address. How long it actually takes depends on many factors. It may take only a few minutes. If after a few hours, you have not received the e-mail, delete your .forward file. Try again, if you wish. Or you might try on another day just in case the CS Dept. mail server, or the one at your preferred site, was temporarily out of commission. If you have repeated problems getting mail forwarded quickly, you might want to rethink your desire to use this feature. For most people, this procedure works without much trouble.

You can actually have more than one forwarding address. The .forward file can contain a comma-separated list of forwarding addresses. For example, you might use