Email Forwarding at the account level

Hi there,
We are using Dreamhosters for our email and are able to setup email forwarding via the panel just fine.

We have a bunch of accounts though, and noticed that forwarding cannot be setup via the mailboxes.yourdomain.com or webmail.yourdomain.com tools?

We want to have our staff setup forwards on their own, without us having to give them panel access. Is there a way to do this?

Some other tool we could install on our server that would allow us to do what we are looking for perhaps?

Any help is greatly appreciated :)

Cheers,

Jon

You can have shell account email forwarded by creating a ".forward" file in the account's home directory. The contents of the .forward file can just be the forwarding email address.

Edited by habilis on 09/30/08 04:13 PM (server time).

Hey There,

Trouble is though, we have 15 accounts and none of them are shell accounts. They are all email only accounts setup via the Dreamhost panel...

It's my understanding that the .forward file won't work in this context.

I have a support ticket open as well. Fingers crossed there is some way to acheive what we are after here.

If there be any one in these fine forums with some suggestions I'm all ears. Have already tried installing our own copy of Squirrelmail with the AutoRespond/Forward filter, but once again, that requires local mail users with shell accounts.

:(

My apologies - I didn't understand.

One option is to use GMail for your domain, which supports user-defined forwarding. Obviously, this would involve a possibly painful transition/conversion...

Thanks for jumping in and trying to help anyhow. Given the lack of response from DH on all counts (i.e. forum and support ticket) Gmail is starting to look like the only available option.

Option #2 is moving away from this service altogether in favour of something with a more robust email system. We get what we pay for in life, and when we pay peanuts we get things like Squirrelmail and web 1.0 Mailbox control panels with 2% of the features it should have.

Kinda sad for DH to be so sweet and so sad in this respect all at the same time. Email forwarding (i.e. to a blackberry) is an ESSENTIAL service that people need to enable/disable at whim without having to open up a complex panel and carefully eek their way around stuff that could bring down the entire system just to setup a forwarding rule.

I've tried setting up a limited account to allow the individiual users to login to the main panel so they can forward, but sadly they cannot access a single email account without also be able to access the whole domain.

Using 'Account Privledges' in the panel to create a limited access role still presents the basic non-technical email user with a whole world of HELL for their eyes to behold.

*sigh*.... :(