Topic: Qmail forwarding/aliases

[Greg Shaffer]

Hello -

Can anyone point me in the right direction for information on how mail forwarding and aliases are handled in qmail?  I can find a lot of bits and pieces of information, but it seems like it is all trees and no forest and it only indirectly applies to e-smith.  Note that in addition to be an e-smith/qmail beginner, I also do not know much about sendmail.

Basically I am hoping to switch from netscape mail server (NMS) to e-smith/qmail but I can't seem to figure out how to handle two email forwarding situations.  They are as follows:

1) Old users - I want mail address to joe@mydomain forwarded to joe@joesnewdomain.  I don't want to maintain a current user account for joe, I just want those messages redirected to his new server (on NMS I have a single file with each line containing and entry user@mydomain:user@newdomain ).  Is there an equivalent?


2) Group forwards - can I set up a mail forwarding group/alias so that mail sent to bunchoffolks@mydomain can forward to a number of users within my domain as well as several users with addresses in other domains?

I have spent time enough time researching this to know that I need to use some sort of manually edited .xxx files to accomplish this (e.g. .qmail for users & groups? and various sendmail compatible files) but at least some of these seem to cause  problems in the web interface.  I found several add-ons to qmail that handle forwards in a way that makes sense to me, but they all seem to require recompiling qmail and that doesn't seem advisable with e-smith.  Is there any package I can use on E-smith to make this easier?  

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Greg

[Charlie Brady]

Greg Shaffer wrote:

> Can anyone point me in the right direction for information on
> how mail forwarding and aliases are handled in qmail?

You can find way more information than you need via www.qmail.org.

"man -M /var/qmail/man dot-qmail" will tell you the most important stuff.

> 1) Old users - I want mail address to joe@mydomain forwarded
> to joe@joesnewdomain.  I don't want to maintain a current
> user account for joe, I just want those messages redirected
> to his new server (on NMS I have a single file with each line
> containing and entry user@mydomain:user@newdomain ).  Is
> there an equivalent?

The *easiest* way to do this is to create an account for joe, but don't set up a password. Enter joe's forwarding address into the appropriate place in the form.

> 2) Group forwards - can I set up a mail forwarding
> group/alias so that mail sent to bunchoffolks@mydomain can
> forward to a number of users within my domain as well as
> several users with addresses in other domains?

The *easiest* way to do this is to create a group called "bunchoffolks". For each off-site user, create a locked account with mail forward as in the case of joe, above.

Regards

Charlie

[Rodney]

Charlie Brady, Referring to Greg Shaffer's questions: In this exa. after I have created that group "bunchoffolks" where/how do we forward mail from the alias to this group of users?