Forwarding email at CSE
CSE currently uses locally-written application called mlalias This takes email sent to a CSE address and forwards it to the recipient(s) defined in the mlalias defined for that address. As there can be more than one recipient, mlalias is therefore useful for most instances where someone wants to forward, redirect or broadcast email. It also allows control over who can mail to an address and allows moderation of email sent to a list of people.Anybody is allowed to create mlaliases under their own username but if you want one with a different name, for instance for a conference, it has to be created by System Support.
The simplest use of mlalias is to forward your own mail to one or more addresses.
The quick and easy way
The simplest way to configure your mail forwarding at CSE is to load the Account Control Panel mail forwarding page and set your desired redirection using the controls.Setting a redirection using the commandline program mlalias
Basic commands
The most basic commands are listed below. For more details, read the mlalias manual entry.- mlalias -C username
- creates a mail alias for your account (username@cse.unsw.edu.au).
- mlalias username -a remote@address
- will add remote@address to the list of places mail to your CSE account will be sent to.
- mlalias username -d remote@address
- will remove remote@address from the alias
- mlalias -R username
- will delete the mail alias. Mail will then deliver straight to your account.
Example: Setting a forward rule for your CSE address
Fred Bloggs (fbloggs@cse) wants to read his email both at CSE and at home, so he:- creates an mlalias for his mail address: -C fbloggs
- adds both his CSE account and the yahoo address he uses at home: -a fbloggs fredbloggs@yahoo.com.au
mlalias -C fbloggs -a fbloggs fredbloggs@yahoo.com.au
If you change your account name
If you change username, you may wish to modify or remove any mlalias under your old username accordingly; SS will make your old username an alias to your new one, so there is no need to maintain an mlalias for the old username as email sent to your old username will be delivered to your new one. However, since mlalias only matches usernames as simple text doesn't check whether your old and new usernames are referencing the same account. You can force mlalias this via the -u flag in the mlalias command.For example, Fred Bloggs used to have the username fblo123 and created the mlalias fblo123.junk. Now his username is fbloggs; if he tries to change the mlalias with:
mlalias fblo123.junk -a ...
... he will get a "permission denied" error.
Adding the -u flag:
mlalias fblo123.junk -u fblo123 -a ...
tells the mlalias program that fblo123 is the same person as fbloggs, so the change is allowed.