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 of only selected messages, forwarding to multiple addresses, sorting incoming messages into folders, etc).

UNIX based email systems like that run by ECS have traditionally supported flexible email handling by allowing users to have a .forward file in their home directory. This file allowed the specification of arbitrary programs (eg: procmail) that could process incoming email. However the ECS email system no longer supports this facility, mainly because it caused problems for our mail server when one of our home file servers was down. Specifying arbitrary mail processing programs is not currently possible using the web applications described above. In any event having arbitrary programs filter incoming email can be tricky and it is quite easy to lose messages sowe don't recommend it unless you know what you are doing!

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. If there is sufficient demand we will consider extending the web-based applications described above to provide more flexibility. And in the mean-time we may be able to help you set up the email handling you want some other way.

Automatic Email Responses

Setting up automatic email responses (aka "vacation emails" or "Out of Office" replies) was previously possible on ECS systems, but is currently disabled. We hope to have this facility available again in the near future (March 2026?).