The dbmail-users program enables you to manage the DBMail users. It lets you add, delete and change users as well as show information about a specific user or display a list of existing users. It also has the capability of adding/removing separate aliases.

What are aliases and forwards and what is the difference between them?

Users are known to the outside world by their email address, to avoid confusion DBMail uses aliases for incoming email addresses and forwards for outgoing addresses where a user has moved to another organisation and their email is forwarded on to their new address.

DBMail users receive email using one or more alias addresses.

When a user moves to another organisation or domain, they can have their email forwarded onwards.

When creating a new user account, you should add an initial alias that delivers to the account name, or make the account in the form of a fully qualified email address. For example, the user named Baz created like this:

After creating the account you add an alias:

You may add multiple aliases by repeatedly calling dbmail-users, or by calling it with a comma-separated list of aliases:

Three catch-all modes are also supported, for domains, sub-domains, and local parts:

The first example catches email addressed to any user @example.com and delivers it to Baz’s INBOX. The second example catch email address to any user at any subdomain below .allsubs.example.com (not including allsubs.example.com itself!) The third example catches email addressed to baz@ at any domain.

There is no support for delivering to a particular mailbox other than INBOX via the aliases system. Please use a Sieve script to sort mail like this.

Incoming messages addressed to particular email addresses can be forwarded to an outside email addresses, piped out to a command (when prepended with | pipe) or piped out with an mbox-style From line to a command (when prepended with ! bang). For example:

Forwards can be listed using the same --list command as for users. For example, to see where the local address bar@example.com might be forwarded to, use the following:

Forwards can be removed using basic glob style pattern matching. A ? question means "match zero or one of any character" and * asterisk means "match zero or more of any character." For example:

will complete and totally remove the bar@example.com external alias and all of its forwarding addresses and commands.

For example Gollum used to work at example.com but now works at example.org so any email addressed to gollum@example.com is forwarded to gollum@example.org

When Gollum moves to example.net you delete the old forward and add the new one

dbmail(1), dbmail.conf(5), dbmail-deliver(1), dbmail-export(8), dbmail-httpd(8), dbmail-imapd(8), dbmail-lmtpd(8), dbmail-pop3d(8), dbmail-sieved(8), dbmail-sievecmd(8), dbmail-users(8), dbmail-util(8)

For the latest announcements, please subscribe to the DBMail announce mailing list

For general discussion, please subscribe to the DBMail general mailing list

If you experience an issue with DBMail, please report it on the DBMail Bug Tracker. It may be helpful to have a debug log available.

DBMail and its components are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Copyrights are held variously by the authors listed below.

DBMail is a collaborative effort among the core developers listed below and the tremendous help of the testers, patchers and bug hunters listed in the AUTHORS and THANKS files found in the DBMail source distribution.