forwarding your mail

I strongly recommend choosing a central address for reading all your email, and forwarding all your mail to that. That way, you don't leave mail lying all over the place, and checking it is easy. Suppose you happen to prefer to use the address SlithyToad@gyre.gimble.com for your correspondence. To forward your mail from just about any Unix system (this includes mathlab and the IC computers), you merely have to create a file called .forward in your home directory containing that address. There are more ways to do this than I care to describe here. One of them is to type the following at a command prompt: 
echo SlithyToad@gyre.gimble.com >.forward
The echo command just parrots back whatever follows it (much like an echo ...hmmm... I wonder where the name came from...), and then the > tells the shell to use output redirection to stick the result in a file called .forward, creating it if it isn't already there. I've assumed you typed this command from your home directory; if not, you'll have to type cd first.

There are actually a number of fancier things you can do with the .forward file. For example, all of my mail is passed through a program which does some filtering and manipulations prior to delivering the mail (or discarding it, if it is known spam). My .forward looks like 

"| IFS=' ' && exec /usr/local/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #scott"