mail.local(1)                                             mail.local(1)

  mail.local

  NAME

    mail.local - store mail in a mailbox

  SYNOPSIS

    /usr/sbin/mail.local [-f sender] user...

  DESCRIPTION

    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 only option is as follows:
    -f sender
        Specify the sender's name.

    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.

    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
    default 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
    problems 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. Unless
    the -L flag is specified, a username.lock file is also used.

    If the "biff" service is returned by getservbyname(2), the biff server is
    notified of delivered mail.

  DIAGNOSTICS

    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.name
        Temporary files
    /var/mail/user
        The mailbox directory for user

  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 (no relation
    to the Interix mailx(1) or mail(1).

  BUGS

    Since sendmail(1) 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(1) 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(1) to attempt redelivery later. That means that some users will
    keep getting the same message every time sendmail(1) 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/sendmail.cf and remove the "m" from
    the flags section, denoted by "F=". Alternately, you can override the
    default mailer flags by adding the line:

    define('LOCAL_MAILER_FLAGS', 'rn9')dnl

    to your .mc file (this is the source file that is used to generate /etc/
    sendmail.cf).

  SEE ALSO

    mail(1)

    mailx(1)

    sendmail(1)

    flock(2)

    getservbyname(2)