When forwarding is enabled, incoming messages are re-queued for a new e-mail destination (or multiple destinations) of your choice. To also keep a copy of incoming messages, you can specify your INBOX here as one of the destinations.
A typical use of forwarding is when you are consolidating all your e-mail accounts to a single location. For example, if you are a visitor to this institition, you might prefer to have all your math.arizona.edu e-mail sent to the address at another institution where you typically read your e-mail.
Forwarding is perilous! Depending on the destination to which you forward, it may not consider us to have the authority to forward certain types of messages. In that case, those messages will get bounced back to the original sender.
For example, say you have used the instructions on this page to forward all your math.arizona.edu mail to yourotheraddress@someotherinstitution.edu. Now say joeuser@yahoo.com sends a message to you here at math.arizona.edu. Our server will dutifully contact someotherinstitution.edu and say, “This is math.arizona.edu. We have a message from joeuser@yahoo.com for yourotheraddress@someotherinstitution.edu”. But depending on the policies in force at someotherinstitution.edu, they might quickly contact yahoo.com behind-the-scenes and ask, “Is math.arizona.edu authorized to send e-mail on behalf of yahoo.com?” and be told “No!”. In that case, they will then respond to us, “Sorry, we refuse to accept that message, because according to yahoo.com you're not authorized to send a message from joeuser@yahoo.com”. Our server is thus unable to deliver the incoming message, and will bounce it back to the original sender.
If you enable forwarding and your chosen forward destination enforces policies along the lines of the example just given, then you might miss some mail (but at least the sender will receive a bounce informing them that the message didn't go through). We are not responsible for the behavior and policies of your chosen forward destination. If you are missing messages after enabling forwarding, we can help you trace the message through our log files to assist you in contacting the postmasters at the forward destination, but we do not keep copies of messages once delivered or bounced and thus cannot help you recover missing mail.
Note: In the past, here or on another system, you may have used a .procmailrc file to accomplish something similar. Our system does not support use of procmail.
myaccountname@math.arizona.edu, someotheraddress@yahoo.comthen a copy of each incoming message will go into your INBOX here and a copy will be forwarded to yahoo.com.
