sendmail, 4th Edition

Build mail.local

Before building mail.local, you need to decide whether certain definitions should be in your m4 build file.^[166]

When porting to a new system, for example, the maillock(3) library routine for locking user mailboxes prior to delivery might be needed. If so, you will need to define two items in your m4 build file:

APPENDDEF(`conf_mail_local_ENVDEF', `-DMAILLOCK')
APPENDDEF(`conf_mail_local_LIBS', `-lmail')

Here, the first line tells the compiler to include support for maillock(3) as the means to lock local mailboxes for delivery. The second line tells the linker that the maillock(3) and related subroutines are located in the /usr/lib/libmail.a library.

Some versions of Unix require that the mailbox files be group-writable. You can tell whether this is true for your site by changing to the directory where final delivery occurs and producing a long directory listing:

% cd /var/mail                ← or /var/spool/mail or something similar
% ls -l                       ← or ls -lg
-rw-rw----  1 bob      mail        4618 Dec 13  2002 bob
-rw-rw----  1 amy      mail         798 Jan 24 14:43 amy

If these files are all owned by the same group (as mail in the earlier example), you will need to also define the following in your m4 build file:

APPENDDEF(`conf_mail_local_ENVDEF', `-DMAILGID=6')

Here, the gid (the 6) is the number associated with the group mail. This association can be found in the /etc/group file. MAILGID must be defined with a number, not with a name.

Some local delivery agents (such as those that run on the Solaris operating system) ...