maildelivery(F) 19 June 1992 maildelivery(F) Name maildelivery - user delivery specification file Description The delivery of mail by the local channel can run through various courses, including using a user tailorable file. The delivery follows the following strategy, giving up at any point it considers the message delivered. 1. If the address indicates a pipe or file default, then that is carried out. 2. The file .maildelivery in the home directory is read if it exists and the actions in it are followed. 3. If the message still hasn't been delivered, then it is put into the user's normal mailbox. The format of the .maildelivery file is field <FS> pattern <FS> action <FS> result <FS> string where: field is name of a field that is to be searched for a pattern. This is any header field that you might find in a message. The most commonly used headers are: From, To, cc, Subject and Sender. As well as the standard headers, there are some pseudo-headers that can also be used. These are: source the out-of-band sender information. This is the address MMDF would use for reporting delivery problems with the message. addr the address that was used to mail to you, normally yourname or yourname=string (see below). default if the message hasn't been delivered yet, this field is matched. * this case is always true regardless of any other action. pattern is some sequence of characters that may be matched in the above field. Case is not significant. action is one of the mail delivery actions supported by the local channel. Currently the supported actions are file or ``>'', which appends the message to the given file, with delimiters; pipe or ``|'', which starts up a process with the message as the standard input; and destroy which throws the message away. For piped commands, the exit status of the command is signifi- cant. An exit status of 0 implies that the command succeeded and everything went well. An exit status of octal 0300-0377 indicates that a permanent failure occurred and the message should be rejected. Any other exit status indicates a tem- porary failure and the delivery attempt will be aborted and restarted at a later time. result is one of the letters A, R or ? which stand for Accept, Reject and ``Accept if not delivered yet''. They have the following effects: A If the result of this line's action is OK, then the message can be considered delivered. R The message is not to be considered delivered by this action. ? This is equivalent to A except that the action is not car- ried out if the message has already been accepted. The file is always read completely so that several matches can be made, and several actions taken. As a security check, the .maildelivery file must be owned by either the user or root, and must not have group or gen- eral write permission. In addition the system delivery file has the above restrictions but must also be owned by root. If the field specified does not need a pattern, a dash (-), or similar symbol is usually inserted to show that the field is present but not used. The field separator charac- ter can be a tab, space or comma (,). These characters can be included within a field by quoting them with double quotes ("); double quotes can be included preceded by a backslash (\). MMDF treats local addresses which contain an equal sign (=) in a special manner. Everything in a local address from an equal sign to the ``@'' is ignored and passed on to the local channel. The local channel will make the entire string available for matching against the ``addr'' string of the MMDF file. For example, if you were to subscribe to a digest as ``foo=digest@bar.NET'', submit(ADM) and the local channel will verify that it is legal to deliver to ``foo'', but then the entire string ``foo=digest'' will be available for string matching against the MMDF file for the ``addr'' field. Environment The environment in which piped programs are run contains a few standard features, specifically: HOME is set to the user's home directory. USER is set to the user's login name. SHELL is set to the user's login shell (defaults to /bin/sh). The default umask is set to 077 (a very protective creation mask). A shell script can be run first to set up more complex environments. There are certain built-in variables that you can give to a piped pro- gram. These are $(sender), $(address), $(size), $(reply-to) and $(info). $(sender) is set to the return address for the message. $(address) is set to the address that was used to mail to you, normally `yourname' or `yourname=string'. $(size) is set to the size in bytes of this message. $(reply-to) is set to the Reply-To: field (or the From: field if the former is missing) and so can be used for automatic replies. $(info) is the info field from the internal mail header and is probably only of interest to the system administrators. Example Here is a rough idea of what a .maildelivery file looks like: # lines starting with a ``#'' are ignored. # as are blank lines # file mail with mmdf2 in the "To:" line into file mmdf2.log To mmdf2 file A mmdf2.log # Messages from mmdf pipe to the program err-message-archive From mmdf pipe A err-message-archive # Anything with the "Sender:" address "uk-mmdf-workers" # file in mmdf2.log if not filed already Sender uk-mmdf-workers file ? mmdf2.log # "To:" unix - put in file unix-news To Unix > A unix-news # if the address is jpo=mmdf - pipe into mmdf-redist Addr jpo=mmdf | A mmdf-redist # if the address is jpo=ack - send an acknowledgement copy back Addr jpo=ack | R resend -r $(reply-to) # anything from steve - destroy! from steve destroy A - # anything not matched yet - put into mailbox default - > ? mailbox # always run rcvalert * - | R rcvalert File $HOME/.maildelivery normal location See also mmdftailor(F), rcvalert(C), rcvfile(C), rcvprint(C), rcvtrip(C) Credit MMDF was developed at the University of Delaware and is used with permis- sion.