Quick email forwarder in Shell

I’m always create new forwarding emails for different websites – helps me track down if and when their email list is hacked… To save logging into cPanel or WHM, I’ve created a little script to quickly add new forwarding emails.

#!/bin/sh

##############################################################
#                                                            #
#  QUICK EMAIL FORWARDER                                     #
#                                                            #
#  Coded by Noah Hearle, Design Extreme                      #
#  https://designextreme.com                                 #
#                                                            #
#  Created: 2017/01/23                                       #
#  Modified: 2019/06/11                                      #
#                                                            #
#  Post your comments at:                                    #
#  https://blog.nahoo.co.uk/quick-email-forwarder/       #
#                                                            #
#  Usage: sh ./quick_email_forwarder.sh <alias> [--delete]   #
#                                                            #
##############################################################

## ARGUMENTS ##

alias=$1
delete=$2

## SETTINGS ##

user=abcdomain
domain=abcdomain.com
list=/etc/valiases/$domain
delete_regex='^[-]*d(elete)?$'
email=$alias@$domain
email_account=account@$domain

if [ ! -f "$list" ]; then
        echo -e "\e[38;5;202mError:\e[0m Domain name '$domain' doesn’t exist in /etc/valiases/"
        exit
fi

last_line="$(tail -n 1 $list)"

if [ -n "$2" ] && [[ $delete =~ $delete_regex ]]; then
        if [ "$(grep -c $email $list)" -eq 0 ]; then
                echo -e "\e[33mWarning:\e[0m Cannot remove $email as it is not found"
                exit
        fi

        sed -i "/$email: $email_account/d" $list
        echo -e "\e[92mSuccess:\e[0m Removed email: $email"
        exit
fi

if [ "$(grep -c $email $list)" -gt 0 ]; then
        echo -e "\e[33mWarning:\e[0m $email already exists"
        exit
fi

sed -i '$ d' $list
echo $email: $email_account >> $list
sort $list -o $list
echo $last_line >> $list
chown --from=root.root $user.mail $list
echo -e "\e[92mSuccess:\e[0m Added email: $email"

Edit the settings to fit your domain and email setup. For multiple destinations, just use “, ” to separate the email addresses.

To make your special new email address, simply call the script with the alias as the only argument with an option -d or –delete command to remove an existing forwarder.

sh ./quick_email_forwarder.sh alias [--delete]

Please let me know what you think!

Last updated on Tuesday, 11th June 2019