deliver(1)                    Mail Avenger 0.8.1                    deliver(1)



NAME
       deliver - deliver mail to a mailbox or maildir spool

SYNOPSIS
       deliver [--umask[=val]] destination1 [destination2 ...]

DESCRIPTION
       Takes a mail message on standard input, and delivers it to one or more
       destination mailboxes.  If a destination ends with a "/" character, it
       is interpreted as a qmail maildir format directory (which will be
       created if it doesn't already exist).  Otherwise, if the destination
       does not end with a "/" character, it is interpreted as a Unix mbox
       format file.

       If one of the mailboxes is specified as -, deliver will send a copy of
       the message to its standard output after generating the appropriate
       "From " and "Return-Path:" lines, if necessary.  This is useful when
       piping messages to programs from avenger.local(8) scripts, as
       avenger.local does not generate any "From " or "Return-Path: " lines,
       while deliver will generate these based on the SENDER environment
       variable.

       OPTIONS

       --copy
           If deliver cannot seek on its standard input, it will first copy
           the message to a temporary file before attempting any deliveries.
           Usually this only occurs when deliver is being fed the output of
           another program through a pipe.  The --copy option forces copying
           regardless of whether deliver could rewind the file pointer.

       --fcntl (-P)
           This option enables fcntl (a.k.a. POSIX) file locking of mail
           spools, in addition to flock and dotfile locking.  The advantage of
           fcntl locking is that it may do the right thing over NFS.  However,
           if either the NFS client or server does not properly support fcntl
           locking, or if the file system is not mounted with the appropriate
           options, fcntl locking can fail in one of several ways.  It can
           allow different processes to lock the same file concurrently--even
           on the same machine.  It can simply hang when trying to acquire a
           lock, even if no other process holds a lock on the file.  Also, on
           some OSes it can interact badly with flock locking, because those
           OSes actually implement flock in terms of fcntl.

       --norewind
           By default, if deliver can rewind its standard input, it will do so
           before reading the message.  This lets scripts more easily run
           several commands over their standard input when that input is a
           file.  For example, a shell script might do the following:

                    if test YES = "`formail -cxz X-Spam-Status:`"; then
                        deliver $HOME/Mail/spam/
                    else
                        deliver $HOME/Mail/ham/
                    fi

           The --norewind inhibits that behavior, so that the above script
           would likely give unintended results.  --norewind is useful for
           testing scripts that aren't supposed to assume they are getting
           input from a file.

       --umask
       --umask=val
           By default, deliver creates all files and directories with a umask
           value of 077--meaning files are not readable or writeable by
           others.  The --umask option tells deliver to keep whatever umask it
           was invoked with.  The --umask=val option tells deliver to use a
           umask of val.  Note that to specify val in octal, you must prefix
           it with a 0, so the default is equivalent to --umask=077, but not
           --umask=77.

ENVIRONMENT
       The following environment variable affects deliver's operation.

       SENDER
           Specifies the envelope sender (bounce address) of the message.  For
           maildir format mailboxes, the sender will be included in a
           "Return-Path:" header.  For mbox format mailboxes, the sender is
           reflected in the first line, which will contain "From SENDER ...".
           If SENDER is unspecified, deliver will attempt to extract it from
           the first line of the message, if that line begins "From " or
           "Return-Path:".  Otherwise, the sender will probably be incorrectly
           set.

EXAMPLES
       Using avenger.local, to set up an address as a spam trap that reports
       any messages it receives as spam, you might place the following in the
       appropriate .avenger/local file:

           | deliver - | spamassassin -r

       If you want to reject spam messages during SMTP transactions using
       spamassassin, but still want to keep a copy of the spams in
       $HOME/Mail/spam-log to keep an eye on how spamassassin is doing, you
       might place the line "bodytest $HOME/.avenger/spam-check", and write
       the spam-check shell script as follows:

           #!/bin/sh
           edinplace -x 111 spamassassin -e 100
           case "$?" in
               0)
                   ;;
               100)
                   echo Sorry, spamassassin has flagged this message as spam
                   deliver $HOME/Mail/spam-log
                   exit 100
                   ;;
               111)
                   echo Sorry, spamassassin has encountered a temporary error
                   exit 111
                   ;;
               *)
                   echo Sorry, spamassassin exited witn an unknown status
                   exit 111
                   ;;
           esac

       Note here that the bodytest script does not need to pipe the message
       through "deliver -" before spamassassin, because bodytest's standard
       input does contain "From " and "Return-Path:" lines, even though
       avenger.local command input does not.

SEE ALSO
       avenger(1), dotlock(1), mailexec(1), avenger.local(8)

       The Mail Avenger home page: <http://www.mailavenger.org/>.

BUGS
       When delivering to multiple destinations, if one of them fails, deliver
       will halt with a non-zero exit status.  However, it is not possible to
       know which destination caused the delivery failure.

       To protect against concurrent accesses to mbox format files, deliver
       uses both flock and dotfiles to lock mailboxes.  However, it does not
       use fcntl/lockf-style locking by default.  Thus, if your mail reader
       exclusively uses fcntl for locking, there will be race conditions
       unless you specify the --fcntl option.

AUTHOR
       David Mazieres



Mail Avenger 0.8.1                2010-04-12                        deliver(1)
