RMAIL

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: 7 January 1986
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NAME

rmail - submit remote mail received via UUCP

SYNOPSIS

rmail user ...

DESCRIPTION

Rmail interprets incoming mail received via uucp(1C), passing the processed mail on to submit(8) for processing by the MMDF mail system. Rmail is explicitly designed for use with UUCP and the MMDF submit program. It is not intended for use by regular users.

Rmail performs several conversions on the incoming mail before calling submit. The conversions change addresses from the UUCP routing style (lists of hosts separated by the character `!') to the domain style of address used within the MMDF mail system. The incoming message is dealt with in the following manner:

1): The initial `From' (or `>From') line is processed to discover the originating site and the sender of the message. Some UUCP mailers do not supply this information as part of the message body. If the originating site cannot be found from this information, the program environment is inspected for the variable `ACCTSYS'; this is set to the originating system by some implementations of UUCP. The originating system is used as a table lookup value into the mmdf table `rmail.chans', the file contains site/channel pairs. If a match is found the resulting channel is used for the submit phase. The default UUCP channel is used if no match is found. The default channel name is specified in conf.c source and can be runtime tailored. Typically it is `uucp'. The existence of this channel is MANDATORY to prevent dropping mail from unknown hosts.
2): The body of the message is inspected looking for any header lines containing addresses; the lines are `From:', `To:', `Cc:', `Bcc:' and `Sender:'. By scanning the address chains, the addresses in these lines are converted into `user@known-site.domain' form using the MMDF tables to evaluate whether the mailer knows the site. For this to work properly, the unqualified name of all sites should exist in the appropriate domain tables. The scanning stops when an unknown site is discovered and a composite address will be created. The `From:' line is treated specially to preserve any comment information which may have been inserted by the originating mailer.
3): The `Date:' line is also re-written into ARPA standard form.

Before submit is called, the message is re-written into RFC822/733 form with all addresses obeying the appropriate convention. Any missing header lines are supplied. The destination address for the message is taken from the argument to rmail , and so the header re-writing which is done does not affect the routing of the message.

BUGS

Rmail should not reside in /bin.
It is virtually impossible to do a completely valid conversion job.
Rmail should be replaced by something that resembles Batch-SMTP.