The file $HOME/.forward is used by the MDA of a system to allow user-defined treatment of incoming email like e.g. forwarding to another address or handling them over to procmail.
All contained paths have to be given in absolute form.
To have a simple forwarding, e.g. for certain shell accounts which imply an email address, simply put the destination address into the .forward as single entry on a single line:
user@anotherhost.com
To make incoming mail being handled over to another program as it's standard
input stream, use a leading pipe-symbol (|
) like so:
"| /usr/bin/procmail"
The complete .forward syntax is described in forward(5)
. Sadly this
file doesn't exist on many systems, so here is a local copy of it.