NAME
mail.local
—
store mail in a mailbox
SYNOPSIS
mail.local |
[-Ll ] [-f
from] user ... |
DESCRIPTION
mail.local
reads the standard input up to
an end-of-file and appends it to each user's
mail file. The user must be a
valid user name.
The options are as follows:
-f
from- Specify the sender's name.
-L
- Don't create a username.lock file while locking the spool.
-l
- For compatibility, request that files named username.lock be used for locking. (This is the default behavior.)
Individual mail messages in the mailbox are delimited by an empty
line followed by a line beginning with the string
“From ”. A line containing the string
“From ”, the sender's name and a timestamp is prepended
to each delivered mail message. A blank line is appended to each message. A
greater-than character (‘>
’) is
prepended to any line in the message which could be mistaken for a
“From ” delimiter line.
Significant effort has been made to ensure that
mail.local
acts as securely as possible. It will
only deliver to a mail spool directory that is not world-writable. The
default mode of /var/mail on
OpenBSD is 755, which prevents non-root processes
from creating mail spool files. The MTA is expected to either create the
mail spool file itself, or call mail.local
as
root.
The mailbox is always locked using
flock(2) while mail is appended. Unless the
-L
flag is specified, a
username.lock file is also used.
If the biff(1) service is returned by getservbyname(3), the biff server is notified of delivered mail.
ENVIRONMENT
TZ
- Used to set the appropriate time zone on the timestamp.
FILES
- /tmp/local.XXXXXXXXXX
- temporary files
- /var/mail/user
- user's mailbox directory
EXIT STATUS
The mail.local
utility exits 0 on
success, and >0 if an error occurs.
SEE ALSO
biff(1), mail(1), flock(2), getservbyname(3), comsat(8), smtpd(8)
HISTORY
A superset of mail.local
(handling mailbox
reading as well as mail delivery) appeared in
Version 7 AT&T UNIX as the program
mail(1).
BUGS
Using quotas in /var/mail can be
problematic if using
sendmail(8) as an MTA, since it asks
mail.local
to deliver a message to multiple
recipients if possible. This causes problems in a quota environment since a
message may be delivered to some users but not others due to disk quotas.
Even though the message was delivered to some of the recipients,
mail.local
will exit with an exit code > 0,
causing sendmail(8) to attempt redelivery later. That means that some
users will keep getting the same message every time
sendmail(8) runs its queue. This problem does not exist for
smtpd(8) users.
If you are running sendmail(8) and have disk quotas on /var/mail it is imperative that you unset the “m” mailer flag for the ‘local’ mailer. To do this, locate the line beginning with “Mlocal” in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf and remove the “m” from the flags section, denoted by “F=”. Alternately, you can override the default mailer flags by adding the line:
define(`LOCAL_MAILER_FLAGS',
`rn9S')dnl
to your “.mc” file (this is the source file that is used to generate /etc/mail/sendmail.cf).