Email Forwarding

Emails to @debian.org now go through a LDAP distributed email system. This system uses the forwarding field in the LDAP directory to route mail without passing it through a users .forward/.qmail file on a single computer. Multiple machines participate in the forwarding to provide redudency.

The system is very simple, each of the forwarders inspects the ldap database to see if foo@debian.org has fowarding set to an address, if so the envelope address to is rewritten and the message redirected to that address. Otherwise the message is relayed to master.debian.org for processing by the users .qmail files. If email forwarding is setup then .qmail files are NOT considered. Extension addresses (foo-lists) are always routed directly to master for processing.

All machines also use the forwarding attribute as a default destination for email. If the user has a home directory and no .forward file the mail is forwarded rather than delivered to /var/spool/mail. This makes sure cron reports, bug responses and other unexpected emails are not lost.

The email forwarding can be easially reconfigured using GnuPG:

echo "emailfoward: foo@bar.com" | gpg --clearsign | mail change@db.debian.org

or by visiting db.debian.org/

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You can contact us at admin@db.debian.org.