MAILDELIVERY

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

1)

If the address indicates a pipe or file default then that is carried out.

2)

The file .maildelivery (or something similar) in the home directory is read if it exists and the actions in it are followed.

3)

A system-wide file is consulted next, such as /usr/lib/maildelivery and the actions are similar to 2.

4)

If the message still hasn't been delivered, then it is put into the user's normal mailbox (.mail or mailbox) depending on the system.

The format of the .maildelivery file is

field <FS> pattern <FS> action <FS> result <FS> string

field

is name of a field that is to be searched for a pattern. This is any header field that you might find in a message. The most commonly used headers are usually From, to, cc, subject and sender. As well as the standard headers, there are some pseudo-headers that can also be used. These are:

source

The out of band sender information. This is the address MMDF would use for reporting delivery problems with the message.

addr

the address that was used to mail to you, normally 'yourname' or

default

if the message hasn't been delivered yet, this field is matched.

*

this case is always true regardless of any other action.

pattern

is some sequence of characters that may be matched in the above field. Case is not significant.

action

is one of the mail delivery actions supported by the local channel. Currently the supported actions are file or >, which appends the message to the given file, with delimiters; pipe or |, which starts up a process with the message as the standard input; and destroy which throws the message away.
For piped commands, the exit status of the command is significant. An exit status of 0 implies that the command succeeded and everything went well. An exit status of octal 0300-0377 indicates that a permanent failure occurred and the message should be rejected, these error codes are given in mmdf.h. Any other exit status, including the case where the command could not be found, indicates a temporary failure and the delivery attempt will be aborted and restarted at a later time.

result

is one of the letters A, R or ? which stand for Accept, Reject and "Accept if not delivered yet". They have the following effects:

A

If the result of this line's action is OK, then the message can be considered delivered.

R

The message is not to be considered delivered by this action.

?

This is equivalent to A except that the action is not carried out if the message has already been accepted.

The file is always read completely so that several matches can be made, and several actions taken. As a security check, the .maildelivery file must be owned by either the user or root, and must not have group or general write permission. For example:

-rw-r--r--  1      long.csnet         522 Mar  8 15:06 .maildelivery

MMDF treats local addresses which contain an equal sign (=) in a special manner. Everything in a local address from an equal sign to the at sign (@) is ignored and passed on to the local channel. The local channel will make the entire string available for matching against the addr string of the .maildelivery file. For example, if you were to subscribe to a digest as "foo=digest@bar.NET", submit and the local channel will verify that it is legal to deliver to "foo", but then the entire string "foo=digest" will be available for string matching against the .maildelivery file for the addr field.  

ENVIRONMENT

HOME is set to the user's home directory.
USER is set to the user's login name.
SHELL is set to the user's login shell (defaults to /bin/sh).

There are certain built-in variables that you can give to a piped program. These are $(sender), $(address), $(size), $(reply-to) and $(info). $(sender) is set to the return address for the message. $(address) is set to the address that was used to mail to you, normally `yourname' or `yourname=string'. $(size) is set to the size in bytes of this message. $(reply-to) is set to the Reply-To: field (or the From: field if the former is missing) and so can be used for automatic replies. $(info) is the info field from the internal mail header and is probably only of interest to the system maintainers.  

EXAMPLE

Here is a rough idea of what a .maildelivery file looks like:

# lines starting with a '#' are ignored.
# as are blank lines
# file mail with mmdf2 in the "To:" line into file mmdf2.log
To~~~~mmdf2~~~~file~~~~A~~~~mmdf2.log
# Messages from mmdf pipe to the program err-message-archive
From~~~~mmdf~~~~pipe~~~~A~~~~err-message-archive
# Anything with the "Sender:" address "uk-mmdf-workers"
# file in mmdf2.log if not filed already
Sender~~~~uk-mmdf-workers~~~~file~~~~?~~~~mmdf2.log
# "To:" unix - put in file unix-news
To~~~~Unix~~~~>~~~~A~~~~unix-news
# if the address is jpo=mmdf - pipe into mmdf-redist
Addr~~~~jpo=mmdf~~~~|~~~~A~~~~mmdf-redist
# if the address is jpo=ack - send an acknowledgement copy back
Addr~~~~jpo=ack~~~~|~~~~R~~~~resend~~-r~~$(reply-to)
# anything from steve - destroy!
from~~~~steve~~~~destroy~~~~A~~~~-
# anything not matched yet - put into mailbox
default~~~~-~~~~>~~~~?~~~~mailbox
# always run rcvalert
*~~~~-~~~~|~~~~R~~~~rcvalert~~$(size)

FILES

default~~~~-~~~~pipe~~~~A~~~~stdreceive
*~~~~~~~~~-~~~~pipe~~~~R~~~~ttynotify

This allows interfacing to non-standard mail systems, ones that don't believe in delimiter-separated mailboxes  

SEE ALSO

BUGS

(Maybe because someone forgot?)

Index

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

ENVIRONMENT

EXAMPLE

FILES

SEE ALSO

BUGS