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deliver(1) Mail Avenger 0.8.5 deliver(1)

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

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.
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.
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.

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.

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.

SEE ALSO

avenger(1), dotlock(1), mailexec(1), avenger.local(8)

The Mail Avenger home page: <http://www.mailavenger.org/>.

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

2018-10-09 Mail Avenger 0.8.5