mail.local reads the standard input up to an end-of-file and appends it to each user's mail file (mailbox). This program is intended to be used by sendmail(1M) as a mail delivery agent for local mail. It is not a user interface agent.

Messages are appended to the user's mail file in the /var/mail directory. The user must be a valid user name.

Each delivered mail message in the mailbox is preceded by a "Unix From line" with the following format:

From sender_address time_stamp

The sender_address is extracted from the SMTP envelope address (the envelope address is specified with the -f option).

A trailing blank line is also added to the end of each message.

The mail files are locked with a .lock file while mail is appended.

The mail files are created with mode 660, owner is set to recipient, and group is set to mail. If the ``biff'' service is returned by getservbyname(3SOCKET), the biff server is notified of delivered mail. This program also computes the Content-Length: header which will be used by the mailbox reader to mark the message boundary.

The following options are supported:

-f sender

Specifies the "envelope from address" of the message. This flag is technically optional, but should be used.

-d

Specifies the recipient of the message. This flag is also optional and is supported here for backward compatibility. That is, mail.local recipient is the same as mail.local -d recipient.

-l

Turn on LMTP mode.

-r from

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

-7

Do not advertise 8BITMIME support in LMTP mode.

-b

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

The following operand is supported:

recipient

The recipient of the mail message.

TZ

Used to set the appropriate time zone on the timestamp.

The following exit values are returned:

0

Successful operation.

>0

An error occurred.

/tmp/local.XXXXXX

temporary files

/tmp/lochd.XXXXXX

temporary files

/var/mail/user_name

user's mail file

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

mail(1), comsat(1M), sendmail(1M), getservbyname(3SOCKET), attributes(5)