mail.local - store mail in a mailbox

mail.local [-7] [-d] [-l] [-f from] user ...

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:

-7

Do not advertise 8BITMIME support in LMTP mode.

-b

Return a permanent error instead of a temporary error if a mailbox exceeds quota.

-d

Specify this is a delivery (for backward compatibility).

-f from

Specify the sender's name.

-l

Turn on LMTP mode.

-r from

Specify the sender's name (for backward compatibility).

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 time stamp 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 (that is, a line beginning with the five characters ``From '' following a blank line).

The mail files are exclusively locked with flock(2) while mail is appended, and a user.lock file also is created while the mailbox is locked for compatibility with older MUAs.

If the ``biff'' 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.

TZ

Used to set the appropriate time zone on the timestamp.

/tmp/local.XXXXXX

temporary files

/var/mail/user

user's mailbox directory

/var/mail/user.lock

lock file for a user's mailbox

mail(1), xsend(1), flock(2), getservbyname(3), comsat(8), sendmail(8)

A superset of mail.local (handling mailbox reading as well as mail delivery) appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX as the program mail.