sendmail, 4th Edition

local and prog

Final local delivery V8.1 and later

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	How to define A= with your mc configuration on page 738	A=mail -d $u
LOCAL_MAILER_CHARSET	C= on page 741	No C= default
LOCAL_MAILER_DSN_DIAGNOSTIC_CODE	T= on page 754	T=X-Unix
LOCAL_MAILER_EOL	E= on page 742	No E= default
LOCAL_MAILER_FLAGS ...