Toolserver:Mail

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Each Toolserver account has an email address associated with it. For most (newer) accounts this is stored in LDAP, but older accounts may have an address in the $HOME/.forward file instead. Initially, this address is set to the address you gave when creating your account. This address will be used when administrators need to contact you, and mails sent to <yourusername>@toolserver.org will be forwarded to this address. Although it is possible to remove the email address from your account, we strongly recommend not doing this, as you will not receive mail from administrators, and you will find it much harder to recover your account if you lose your SSH private key.

If your email address is stored in LDAP, then you can change the address by running setmail. If the address is configured with a .forward file, you can just edit the file, but we recommend moving the address to LDAP, by running setmail, then deleting the .forward file.

Forwarding mail to local programs

Sometimes, you might want mail to be delivered to a local program; for example if you wanted to process email commands for a tool, or handle a mailing list. You can do this by creating a file called $HOME/.forward+extn, and writing | /path/to/program in it. Mail sent to user+extn@toolserver.org will then be sent to the program on stdin. extn can be any string valid in an email address.

Programs started in this way will be run on either hawthorn or clematis. It's probably better to simply use the program to queue the mails somehow, then process the queue later (e.g. from cron); this makes it less likely that mail will be lost if there's a problem with the program.

Administration

If a mail queue is stuck on a particular Debian host (mailq shows mails that are older than an hour), this is usually due to aliasd having crashed. Operators can restart the queue by:

$ # First, make sure it's really dead.
$ sudo /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d aliasd stop
$ # Start a new one.
$ sudo /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d aliasd start
$ # Restart the mail server to flush the queue.
$ sudo /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d postfix restart

Category:Communication