[ On Tue, December 9, 1997 at 14:42:22 (+0000), Nigel Metheringham wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [EXIM] I need /bin/mail
>
> /bin/mail should be a very different animal to smail/exim - its generally
> a limited MTA which does delivery into the spool and can invoke the main
> MTA. I believe that smail came with a *very* small /bin/mail replacement
> but my memory may be faulty (most people would ignore it since its only
> needed for a very few types of systems).
/bin/mail on any SysV related system is still a minimalist MUA from the
good old V7 days that can also serve as a local delivery agent. Smail 2
and 3 come with a wee tiny wrapper program that decides if mail is being
read or sent and it then either invokes the original system version for
reading or the "approved" MTA for sending (i.e. to avoid /bin/mail from
trying to deliver directly to a local mailbox). Some systems (including
sysVr4 I think) come with a slightly smarter version that would indeed
invoke a real MTA if the mail was not locally destined (usually
determined if a '!' or '@' appeared in the address).
> sendmail needs /bin/mail to do final mail delivery since it does not
> tickle the spool itself. exim has not need for this. The other main use
> for /bin/mail is script mail invocation - I tend to use a mail which can
> do subjects for this...
Well actually the "approved" mechanism for delivering mail on most
modern BSD system (4.4 and its offspring) seems to be mail.local(8),
which only does local mail delivery. Recent versions of sendmail and
smail-3 use it, and indeed I think mail.local comes in the source
distribution for sendmail thus making it possible to completely revamp
the mail sub-system on any machine (assuming you also replace all MUAs
with ones that properly interlock with mail.local). I'm quite certain
that exim would have no trouble at all with using mail.local for local
delivery too (it would simply be a matter of configuring the local
delivery appropriately to pipe to it). If you're 100% certain that all
of your MUAs interlock with exim, then not using mail.local is OK,
though if it's the other way around then obviously mail.local would be
strongly preferable as the delivery agent of choice.
>From the mail.local(8) manual page on NetBSD:
HISTORY
A superset of mail.local (handling mailbox reading as well as mail deliv-
ery) appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX as the program mail.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 443-1734 VE3TCP <gwoods@???> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@???>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>
--
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