Introduction

We use Exim as our mail daemon. It has a built-in filtering system that allows people to write a ".forward file" to give it custom instructions. Normally this is stored at ~/.forward, but at HCoop we store it at ~/.public/.forward to make it easier to keep the rest of your home directory private. So when we say ".forward" on the rest of this page, we mean ~/.public/.forward.

When email is delivered, the delivery process will run as the USER.daemon user, where USER is your HCoop username.

Delivering all mail to a different address

If you want email sent to your HCoop email address to be forwarded elsewhere, you can do that as follows.

(This is a standard UNIX .forward file.)

Putting mail into separate folders

For anything more complicated, you have two options: sieve and exim filters. In StephenMichel's opinion, sieve filters have the saner syntax, although exim filters are slightly more powerful. To use them, start your .public/.forward file with one of these special lines for identifying the type of filter:

The line above is not an ordinary comment. Any other values will cause Exim to attempt to treat the file as a list of forward addresses instead of a filter file.

Create folders before adding rules for them. Exim is not able to create new folders, only sort mail into existing ones. You should create and subscribe to any folders mentioned in these filters from within your IMAP client before adding them to your filter.