MAIL.LOCAL(8) BSD System Manager's Manual MAIL.LOCAL(8)NAMEmail.local - store mail in a mailbox
SYNOPSISmail.local [-L] [-l] [-f from] user ...
DESCRIPTIONmail.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 For compatibility, request that files named username.lock be used
for locking. (This is the default behavior.)
-L Don't create a username.lock file while locking the spool.
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 efforts have been made to ensure that mail.local acts as
securely as possible if the spool directory is mode 1777 or 755. The de-
fault of mode 755 is more secure, but it prevents mail clients from using
username.lock style locking. The use of 1777 is more flexible in an NFS
shared-spool environment, so many sites use it. However, it does carry
some risks, such as attackers filling the spool disk. Some of these prob-
lems may be alleviated by making the spool a separate filesystem, and
placing quotas on it. The use of any mode other than 1777 and 755 for the
spool directory is recommended against but may work properly.
The mailbox is always locked using flock(2) while mail is appended. Un-
less 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.
The mail.local utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
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
SEE ALSObiff(1), mail(1), flock(2), getservbyname(3), comsat(8), sendmail(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
Since sendmail(8) bases its idea of whether a message has been delivered
or not on the return value from mail.local, using quotas in /var/mail can
be problematic. By default, sendmail(8) will ask 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.
If you are running with 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 over-
ride 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).
MirOS BSD #10-current April 27, 1991 1
