INNMAIL(1)

💌 INNMAIL(1) — InterNetNews Documentation 💌

okay so bestie, welcome to the manual page for innmail from InterNetNews Documentation. this is literally your new fave mail-sending program. let's get into it. ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

innmail — Simple mail-sending program. that's it. that's the name. slay. 💅

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

innmail [-h] [-a header] [-s subject] address [address ...]

like, that's how you run it. periodt. 👑

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so innmail is a Perl script, and its whole vibe is giving you the non-interactive mail-sending functionality of mail(1) while avoiding all the nasty security problems. no cap, it's the safe bestie of mail senders. 💖

it takes the body of a mail message on standard input and sends it to the addresses you specify by invoking the value of mta in inn.conf. so you just pipe in your message, and it does the rest. literally.

at least one address is required — and yes, it should be formatted for the MTA specified in inn.conf, if it matters. innmail will sanitize the addresses so they contain only alphanumerics and the symbols "@", ".", "-", "+", "_", and "%". so don't try to be cute with other symbols, okay? it'll strip them. 🙈

innmail was written to be suitable for the mailcmd setting in inn.conf. so it's meant to slot right in there. main character energy, honestly. 👑

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -a header — Specifies an additional header field to add in the headers of the message. It should be a well-formed header field surrounded by quotes, consisting of a name and a body separated with a colon and a space. For instance, "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" is used by some programs invoking innmail. you may provide more than one header field if header is a multi-line string, which can for instance be done with these commands:

HEADERS=$(echo -e "Hdr1: Body1\nHdr2: Body2")
echo "test" | innmail -a "$HEADERS" -s Test joe

so like, you can stack headers if you're fancy. 💅

• -h — Gives usage information. it's the "help me please" flag. 🆘
• -s subject — Sets the Subject header field body of the message. A warning is issued if this option is omitted. so if you forget it, you get a little warning, but it's not the end of the world. ngl, just add it. 🎀

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🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

this sends a one-line message to the local user "joe":

echo "A one-line message." | innmail -s "Simple message" joe

and innmail by default is used by INN for sending nightly reports to the news administrator, as well as errors during the execution of a few programs. so it's basically the responsible one of the group chat. 🫶

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💀 BUGS 💀

innmail fails on addresses that begin with "-", although one might hope that the news server will not need to contact any such addresses.

so like, if your address starts with a dash, it's gonna choke. hopefully that never happens, but just so you know. 💀

There are many "correct" addresses that will be silently modified by the sanitization process. A news administrator should be careful to use particularly sane addresses if they may be passed to innmail.

so the sanitization is lowkey aggressive and will change stuff silently. be careful, bestie. don't be passing weird addresses. 🙈

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📜 HISTORY 📜

innmail was written by James Brister <brister@vix.com> for InterNetNews. This manual page was originally written by Jeffrey M. Vinocur. so like, credit where credit is due, periodt. 👑

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🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

inn.conf(5), mail(1). check them out, iykyk. ✨

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and that's the tea! this page is from INN 2.7.4, dated 2023-03-07, and it's INNMAIL(1). stay slay, bestie 💅✨💖