Exim: forward and delete (no local delivery)?

[peruda.com]

I have been reading through pages and pages of Exim documentation, but I'm still not sure how to simply setup a scheme that forwards mail to a particular user WITHOUT delivering it to their mailbox. I have several users that want this ability - just to have mail sent to "user@mydomain.dom" forward to -> "user@internetserviceprovider.dom" without having it collect in the local inbox file taking up space and eventually reaching the quota.

I thought this could be done with a .forward file in the user's home directory (/home/mydomain/mail/mydomain.dom/user) but I have had no success.

Any ideas?? Thanks!!!

[chirpy]

AFAIK You can't do that. If you have an email account with the same name as the forward you will always get email delivered to both.

[peruda.com]

Thanks for the response! It seems very strange to me that this cannot be done. I know that Exim is capable of a lot of complex filtering so it seems that it would be a relatively simple thing to! I have offered to pay someone for a solution to this over at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...06#post2149206

So if anyone is proficient in writing Exim filters, I would be happy to pay a reasonable fee for this to be done. Thank you!

-John

[largolam]

Thanks for the response! It seems very strange to me that this cannot be done. I know that Exim is capable of a lot of complex filtering so it seems that it would be a relatively simple thing to! I have offered to pay someone for a solution to this over at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...06#post2149206

So if anyone is proficient in writing Exim filters, I would be happy to pay a reasonable fee for this to be done. Thank you!

-John

Actually, with a *normal* exim setup, if you have a forwarder and a mailbox, it does just forward it, and not store in the mailbox. With this you can have a mailbox, and temporarily forward its mail without deleting the mailbox, then if for some reason you *do* want to both forward it *and* store it, you add both the address you want to forward to, as well as the address of the mailbox itself, and then exim hits the forwarder first, forwards to the external address, and back to the same address. the second time thru as its routing the same address, it recognizes its already been thru the forwarder, and skips that, falling thru the the mailbox.

This is how most mail systems operate, and seems intuitive, and what most people expect, yet for some reason the cpanel 'developers' have gone to great lengths to make their setup *NOT* work that way. Probably there are more 'webmasters' on their team than actual sysadmins, and so they had no experience with the normal way email works. Basically, if all you want it to do is forward, then do *not* create a mailbox/account - create *only* a forwarder, and it will forward the mail to whatever address you set.

[chirpy]

It's not cPanel's "fault". That's how exim works and the exim developers did it that way intentionally.