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local and prog

Final local delivery V8.1 and above

When you enable the local delivery agent with:

MAILER(`local')

you are really enabling two delivery agents—local and prog. The local delivery agent is charged with local, final delivery to a user's mailbox. The prog delivery agent is used to pipe mail through programs.

The local delivery agent

The local delivery agent's job is to deliver mail to its final destination in the user's mailbox. Its name doesn't tell you what program is actually run to perform that delivery, but it is usually either /bin/mail or /usr/libexec/mail.local, although it could also be procmail or spop.

The program you select to perform the role of final delivery will determine the defaults that this delivery agent starts with. If you need to change any of those defaults, you can first determine what they are by looking in your configuration file for the Mlocal lines. They might look like this, for example:

Mlocal,         P=/usr/lib/mail.local, F=lsDFMAw5:/|@qPSXfmnz9,
                S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromL, R=EnvToL/HdrToL,
                T=DNS/RFC822/SMTP, A=mail.local -l

You can use any of the mc configuration macros shown in Table 20-7 to modify or replace these defaults.

Table 20-7. mc macros to modify the local delivery agent

mc macro

§

Default

LOCAL_MAILER_ARGS

See this section

A=mail -d $u

LOCAL_MAILER_CHARSET

C=

no C= default

LOCAL_MAILER_DSN_DIAGNOSTIC_CODE

T=

T=X-Unix

LOCAL_MAILER_EOL

E=

no E= default

LOCAL_MAILER_FLAGS

See this section

F=lsDFMAw5:/|@qPrmn9

LOCAL_MAILER_MAX

See this section

no M= default

LOCAL_MAILER_MAXMSGS

m=

no m= default

LOCAL_MAILER_MAXRCPTS

r=

no r= default

LOCAL_MAILER_PATH

See this section

P=/bin/mail

LOCAL_MAILER_QGRP

Q=

no Q= default

Note that mc configuration macro definitions must always precede the MAILER declaration to which they relate.

The prog delivery agent

The prog delivery agent is used to send mail through programs for final delivery (see Section 12.2.3 for a discussion of this process as it relates to the "|prog" form of aliases). The prog delivery agent is co-declared with the local delivery agent by this MAILER declaration:

MAILER(`local')

The prog delivery agent does not actually run programs itself. Instead, it executes a program that is expert at running other programs. In general, that program is the Bourne shell, /bin/sh. But it as easily can be other shells or programs, such as smrsh(8) (Section 5.8) or ksh(1). To find the defaults defined for your site, look in the sendmail.cf file for a line that begins with Mprog:

Mprog,    P=/bin/sh, F=lsDFMoqeu9, S=EnvFromL/HdrFromL, R=EnvToL/HdrToL, D=$z:/,
          T=X-Unix/X-Unix/X-Unix,
          A=sh -c $u

You can use any of the mc configuration macros shown in Table 20-8 to modify or replace these defaults.

Table 20-8. mc macros to modify the prog delivery agent

mc macro

§

Default

LOCAL_SHELL_ARGS

See this section

A=sh -c $u

LOCAL_SHELL_FLAGS

See this section

F=lsDFMoqeu9

LOCAL_MAILER_MAX

See this section

no M= default

LOCAL_SHELL_DIR

D=

D=$z:/

LOCAL_SHELL_PATH

See this section

P=/bin/sh

LOCAL_PROG_QGRP

Q=

no Q= default

Note that mc configuration macro definitions must always precede the MAILER declaration to which they relate.

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