How do I forward old root emails from the root mailbox to my address?

Eric Crist mnslinky at gmail.com
Sat Apr 28 19:56:13 UTC 2007


On Apr 25, 2007, at 6:23 AMApr 25, 2007, Andreas Widerøe Andersen wrote:

> On 4/25/07, Oliver Peter <hoschi at mouhaha.de> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 11:11:07AM +0200, Andreas Widere Andersen  
>> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> > On one of my FreeBSD servers all system emails to root is stored  
>> in the
>> root
>> > mailbox under /var/mail/root. I have updated my alias file so  
>> new mail
>> is
>> > forwarded to one of my email adresses, but is there a simple way  
>> for me
>> to
>> > send all these old mails in root's mailbox to my email address  
>> without
>> > logging in through pop3/imap?
>> >
>> > A command line trick would be perfect.
>>
>> mutt is your friend.
>>
>> Open the mbox file with
>>           # mutt -R -f /var/mail/root
>>
>> Then Tag all mails (press 'T' then enter '.') and bounce the tagged
>> messages (press ';' and thenn 'b') to your personal email address.
>>
>> That's the easiest way I know.
>> (Of course you need a running MTA, too)
>
>
> Thanks for your reply. I don't have mutt installed and I was hoping  
> for a
> way of doing this without installing additional software. Also, I  
> didn't
> mention that on one of the machines there are probably a year of  
> emails so
> the box is quite large.
>
> Any other ways? I have sendmail installed and running.
>
> Cheers,
> Andreas

Andreas,

Edit /etc/mail/aliases and uncomment the root: line and make it look  
like:

root:  <your_username>

Where <your_username> is the local account and/or email address you  
want to recieve root email.

Save the file, while in the /etc/mail directory, run 'make install &&  
make restart' as root, without the quotes.  all email will now go to  
the new address.

Eric


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list