MAIL.LOCAL(8) | System Manager's Manual | MAIL.LOCAL(8)

# NAME

`mail.local` — store mail in a mailbox

# SYNOPSIS

`mail.local` | [`-Ll`] [`-f` from] 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 options are as follows:

`-f` from
  Specify the sender's name.
`-L`
  Don't create a username.lock file while locking the spool.
`-l`
  For compatibility, request that files named username.lock be used for locking. (This is the default behavior.)

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 timestamp 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 effort has been made to ensure that `mail.local` acts as securely as possible. It will only deliver to a mail spool directory that is not world-writable. The default mode of /var/mail on OpenBSD is 755, which prevents non-root processes from creating mail spool files. The MTA is expected to either create the mail spool file itself, or call `mail.local` as root.

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(1) service is returned by getservbyname(3), the biff server is notified of delivered mail.

# ENVIRONMENT

`TZ`
  Used to set the appropriate time zone on the timestamp.

# FILES

/tmp/local.XXXXXXXXXX
  temporary files
/var/mail/user
  user's mailbox directory

# EXIT STATUS

The `mail.local` utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

# SEE ALSO

biff(1), mail(1), flock(2), getservbyname(3), comsat(8), smtpd(8)

# 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(1).

# BUGS

Using quotas in /var/mail can be problematic if using sendmail(8) as an MTA, since it asks `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(8) to attempt redelivery later. That means that some users will keep getting the same message every time sendmail(8) runs its queue. This problem does not exist for smtpd(8) users.

If you are running sendmail(8) and have 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/mail/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', `rn9S')dnl`

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

March 31, 2022 | Debian