I’ve never really thought that much about the .forward file (said “dot-forward”). You stick an email address in it, and then forget about it. I have several scattered around on various machines, all pointing to the same account on riseup.

But riseup has been migrating to a new mail server, a super slick new mail server, but the migration has been rocky, and mail has been bouncing. So I took this opportunity to look a little deeper into the .forward file, and if it might be a source of deeper, richer functionality.

And of course it was. Your typical .forward file looks like:


kellan@nsa.gov

Which sends all my email to the NSA. But say I wanted to keep a copy for local use, and also send a copy to msft?


<b>\</b>kellan<b>,</b>
linux-watch@microsoft.com<b>,</b>
kellan@nsa.gov

So I can separate as many recipes for mail delivery as I want, separated by commas. The \ in front of my name says deliver locally to ‘kellan’. I had no idea such possibilities lurked within.