Beginning with V8.12, the mail.local program uses the same code as sendmail uses to look up user-mailbox information. By default, mail.local uses the pw mailbox database type, which uses the passwd(5) file, to locate the user's home directory as well as user and group IDs.

Although pw is the only mailbox database type allowed as of V8.12, you can add other mailbox types. For example, if you were to add an LDAP type,^[8] you could then do the following:

^[8] You could do this by editing libsm/mbdb.c and rebuilding the sendmail suite of software.

FEATURE(`local_lmtp')
define(`LOCAL_MAILER_ARGS', `mail.local -l -D ldap')

See MailboxDatabase for a description of mailbox databases and the MailboxDatabase option.