Forwarding existing mail

[Gerald Combs]

On Sat, 25 Jan 2003, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> A user on a system I manage doesn't have the ability to pick up their mail,
> which has accumulated for a while.  The do have an address I can forward it
> to, and I've set that up for new messages, but how do I forward the mail
> that's already been received without having to go into each message and
> manually re-address it?

According to its man page, the "formail" utility that comes with procmail
should be able to do this, e.g.

    formail -s sendmail new at addr.ess < /var/mail/oldmailbox

The "-s" option splits the input into separate messages and feeds them
into the command specified, one at a time.  It has to be the last option
used.  You may have to use "-ds" depending on the mailbox format.