1.6.4 Role in Local Delivery
Another role of the sendmail program is to deliver mail messages to local users. A
local user is one who has a mailbox on the local filesystem. Delivering local mail is
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1.6 Basic Roles of sendmail | 15
done by appending a message to the user??™s mailbox, by feeding the mail message to a
program, or by appending the message to a file other than the user??™s mailbox.
In general, sendmail does not put mail messages directly into files. You saw the
exception in the aliases file, in which you could specifically tell sendmail to append
mail to a file. This is the exception, not the rule. Usually, sendmail calls other programs
to perform delivery. Those other programs are called delivery agents.*
In your sendmail.cf file you found two lines that defined local delivery agents, the
ones that sendmail uses to deliver mail to the local filesystem:
Mlocal, P=/usr/lib/mail.local, F=lsDFMAw5:/|@qPSXfmnz9, S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromL,
Mprog, P=/bin/sh, F=lsDFMoqeu9, S=EnvFromL/HdrFromL, R=EnvToL/HdrToL, D=$z:/,
The /usr/lib/mail.local program is used to append mail to the user??™s mailbox. The /bin/
sh program is used to run other programs that handle delivery.
1.6.5 Delivery to a Mailbox
The configuration file line that begins with Mlocal defines how mail is appended to a
user??™s mailbox file.
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