Ubuntu Manpage: deliver - deliver mail to a mailbox or maildir spool

NAME

       deliver - deliver mail to a mailbox or maildir spool

SYNOPSIS

       deliver [--umask[=val]] destination1 [destination2 ...]

DESCRIPTION

Takes a mail message on standard input, and delivers it to one or more destination
mailboxes. If a destination ends with a "/" character, it is interpreted as a qmail
maildir format directory (which will be created if it doesn't already exist). Otherwise,
if the destination does not end with a "/" character, it is interpreted as a Unix mbox
format file.

If one of the mailboxes is specified as -, deliver will send a copy of the message to its
standard output after generating the appropriate "From " and "Return-Path:" lines, if
necessary. This is useful when piping messages to programs from avenger.local(8) scripts,
as avenger.local does not generate any "From " or "Return-Path: " lines, while deliver
will generate these based on the SENDER environment variable.

OPTIONS
--copy
If deliver cannot seek on its standard input, it will first copy the message to a
temporary file before attempting any deliveries. Usually this only occurs when
deliver is being fed the output of another program through a pipe. The --copy option
forces copying regardless of whether deliver could rewind the file pointer.

--fcntl (-P)
This option enables fcntl (a.k.a. POSIX) file locking of mail spools, in addition to
flock and dotfile locking. The advantage of fcntl locking is that it may do the right
thing over NFS. However, if either the NFS client or server does not properly support
fcntl locking, or if the file system is not mounted with the appropriate options,
fcntl locking can fail in one of several ways. It can allow different processes to
lock the same file concurrently--even on the same machine. It can simply hang when
trying to acquire a lock, even if no other process holds a lock on the file. Also, on
some OSes it can interact badly with flock locking, because those OSes actually
implement flock in terms of fcntl.

--norewind
By default, if deliver can rewind its standard input, it will do so before reading the
message. This lets scripts more easily run several commands over their standard input
when that input is a file. For example, a shell script might do the following:

if test YES = "`formail -cxz X-Spam-Status:`"; then
deliver $HOME/Mail/spam/
else
deliver $HOME/Mail/ham/
fi

The --norewind inhibits that behavior, so that the above script would likely give
unintended results. --norewind is useful for testing scripts that aren't supposed to
assume they are getting input from a file.

--umask
--umask=val
By default, deliver creates all files and directories with a umask value of
077--meaning files are not readable or writable by others. The --umask option tells
deliver to keep whatever umask it was invoked with. The --umask=val option tells
deliver to use a umask of val. Note that to specify val in octal, you must prefix it
with a 0, so the default is equivalent to --umask=077, but not --umask=77.

ENVIRONMENT

       The following environment variable affects deliver's operation.

       SENDER
           Specifies the envelope sender (bounce address) of the message.  For maildir format
           mailboxes, the sender will be included in a "Return-Path:" header.  For mbox format
           mailboxes, the sender is reflected in the first line, which will contain "From SENDER
           ...".  If SENDER is unspecified, deliver will attempt to extract it from the first
           line of the message, if that line begins "From " or "Return-Path:".  Otherwise, the
           sender will probably be incorrectly set.

EXAMPLES

       Using avenger.local, to set up an address as a spam trap that reports any messages it
       receives as spam, you might place the following in the appropriate .avenger/local file:

           | deliver - | spamassassin -r

       If you want to reject spam messages during SMTP transactions using spamassassin, but still
       want to keep a copy of the spams in $HOME/Mail/spam-log to keep an eye on how spamassassin
       is doing, you might place the line "bodytest $HOME/.avenger/spam-check", and write the
       spam-check shell script as follows:

           #!/bin/sh
           edinplace -x 111 spamassassin -e 100
           case "$?" in
               0)
                   ;;
               100)
                   echo Sorry, spamassassin has flagged this message as spam
                   deliver $HOME/Mail/spam-log
                   exit 100
                   ;;
               111)
                   echo Sorry, spamassassin has encountered a temporary error
                   exit 111
                   ;;
               *)
                   echo Sorry, spamassassin exited witn an unknown status
                   exit 111
                   ;;
           esac

       Note here that the bodytest script does not need to pipe the message through "deliver -"
       before spamassassin, because bodytest's standard input does contain "From " and
       "Return-Path:" lines, even though avenger.local command input does not.

BUGS

       When delivering to multiple destinations, if one of them fails, deliver will halt with a
       non-zero exit status.  However, it is not possible to know which destination caused the
       delivery failure.

       To protect against concurrent accesses to mbox format files, deliver uses both flock and
       dotfiles to lock mailboxes.  However, it does not use fcntl/lockf-style locking by
       default.  Thus, if your mail reader exclusively uses fcntl for locking, there will be race
       conditions unless you specify the --fcntl option.

AUTHOR

       David Mazieres