mail.1 (2010 09)

m
mail(1) mail(1)
-r Same as +.
-f file Causes mail to use file (for example,
mbox) instead of the default mailfile .
-t Causes the outbound message to be preceded by each person the mail is sent to. A
person is usually a user name recognized by
login (see login (1)). If a person
being sent mail is not recognized, or if
mail is interrupted during input, the file
dead.letter will be saved to allow editing and resending. Note that
dead.letter is regarded as a temporary file in that it is recreated every time
needed, erasing the previous contents of dead.letter.
-d Causes mail to deliver mail directly. This isolates
mail from making routing
decisions, and allows it to be used as a local delivery agent. Typically this option is
used by auto-routing facilities when they deliver mail locally.
When person s are named,
mail takes the standard input up to an end-of-file (or up to a line consisting
of just a .) and adds it to each person ’s mailfile. The message is preceded by the sender’s name and a
postmark.
To denote a recipient on a remote system, prefix person by the system name and exclamation mark (see
uucp(1)). Everything after the first exclamation mark in person is interpreted by the remote system. In
particular, if person contains additional exclamation marks, it can denote a sequence of machines
through which the message is to be sent on the way to its ultimate destination. For example, specifying
a!b!cde as a recipient’s name causes the message to be sent to user
b!cde on system a. System a
then interprets that destination as a request to send the message to user cde on system b
. This might
be useful, for instance, if the sending system can access system
a but not system b
. mail does not use
uucp if the remote system is the local system name (i.e., localsystem!user).
The
mailfile can be manipulated in two ways to alter the function of mail. The other permissions of
the file can be read-write, read-only, or neither read nor write to allow different levels of privacy. If
changed to other than the default, the file is preserved, even when empty, to perpetuate the desired per-
missions. The file can also contain the first line:
Forward to person
which causes all mail sent to the owner of the
mailfile to be forwarded to person . This is especially
useful for forwarding all of a person’s mail to a given machine in a multiple-machine environment. In
order for forwarding to work properly the
mailfile should have "mail" as group
ID, and the group per-
mission should be read-write.
rmail only permits the sending of mail. uucp uses rmail as a security precaution.
When a user logs in, the command
mail -e can be used to detect the presence of mail, if any, and so
indicate. When terminating, mail produces a notification message if new mail arrived while mail was
running.
EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
Environment Variables
LC_TIME determines the format and contents of the displayed date and time strings.
If
LC_TIME is not specified in the environment or is set to the empty string, the value of LANG is used
as a default for each unspecified or empty variable. If LANG is not specified or is set to the empty string,
a default of "C" (see lang(5)) is used instead of LANG. If any internationalization variable contains an
invalid setting, mail behaves as if all internationalization variables are set to "C". See environ (5).
When set, the
TMPDIR environment variable specifies a directory to be used for temporary files, overrid-
ing the default directory /tmp.
International Code Set Support
Between
HP-UX systems, single- and multi-byte character code sets are supported within mail text.
Headers are restricted to characters from the 7-bit USASCII code set (see ascii (5)).
WARNINGS
Conditions sometimes result in a failure to remove a lock file.
After an interrupt, the next message may not be printed. To force printing, type a p.
Lines that look like postmarks in the message (that is, ‘‘From ...’’) are preceded by
>.
2 Hewlett-Packard Company − 2 − HP-UX 11i Version 3: September 2010