Technical Note - Email Forwarding and Automatic Reply

Summary

This document details how you can enable forwarding of your ECS email to another mailbox.

Details

Email Forwarding

Email forwarding to a single remote address is easily accomplished using our web-based mail settings application.

More Complex Email Handling

Some users may want more complex mail handling (eg: forwarding only selected messages, forwarding to multiple addresses, sorting incoming messages into folders, etc).

UNIX based email systems like that run by ECS traditionally supported flexible email handling by allowing users to have a .forward file in their home directory that could run programs to process incoming email in arbitrary ways. However the ECS email system doesn't allow .forward files as they don't work nicely with our networked home file systems.

A more modern alternative to .forward files that is supported by the ECS email system is the sieve email filtering and processing language. Many email clients have ways of creating and editing sieve scripts but if your favourite client doesn't you can always fall back to the UNIX siesh command-line utility. If you would like help using sieve you can send an email to jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz.

If sieve doesn't meet your requirements you can also email jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz telling us how you want your incoming email processed. We may be able to suggest a way to achieve what you want.

Automatic Email Responses

We used to have a web application that allowed your to set up automatic email responses (aka "vacation emails" or "Out of Office" replies) but it is currently not working. We hope to have this facility available again in the future. In the meantime if you want a vacation response to your ECS email contact jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz and we can set one up for you.