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

Mail Avenger 0.8.4                                 2013-07-13                                         deliver(1)