POSTKICK(1)

💅 POSTKICK(1) — the postkick girlies' guide

okay bestie, welcome to postkick(1) from the General Commands Manual 💖 this is the little command that goes knock knock on a Postfix service and hands it a lil note. she's small, she's powerful, she's lowkey the backbone of half your shell scripts.

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✨ NAME ✨

postkick — kick a Postfix service 🦵✨ (gently. politely. over a local transport channel.)

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

postkick [-c config_dir] [-v] class service request

that's it. three little arguments and two options. she's giving minimalism 💅

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so the postkick(1) command sends request to the specified service over a local transport channel. that's the whole job. she delivers the message, no small talk 🫶

the way this slaps is that it makes Postfix private IPC accessible for use in, for example, shell scripts. like, you can't normally just yell into Postfix's internals from bash — but postkick? she's your hall pass 🎟️

🔥 Options

• -c config_dir — read the main.cf configuration file in the named directory instead of the default configuration directory. basically "use this config folder, not the usual one" 💜
• -v — enable verbose logging for debugging purposes. and bestie, multiple -v options make the software increasingly verbose. one -v is a little chatty, three -v is a whole podcast 😭

👑 Arguments

• class — the name of a class of local transport channel endpoints, either public (accessible by any local user) or private (administrative access only). so like, public is the group chat, private is the admin-only discord 🙈
• service — the name of a local transport endpoint within the named class. the specific door you're knocking on.
• request — a string. and here's the tea: the list of valid requests is service-specific. so don't come at me asking what strings are valid — it depends entirely on which service you're talking to, iykyk 💀

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🩺 DIAGNOSTICS 🩺

problems and transactions are logged to the standard error stream. so if something's off, check your stderr, bestie — she will tell you 🍓

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• MAIL_CONFIG — directory with Postfix configuration files.
• MAIL_VERBOSE — enable verbose logging for debugging purposes. (yes, it's the env var version of -v. twin sisters fr fr 💖)

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⚙️ CONFIGURATION PARAMETERS ⚙️

these main.cf parameters are especially relevant to this program. and ngl the text below is only a parameter summary — for more details including examples, go see postconf(5) 📖

• config_directory (see postconf -d output) — the default location of the Postfix main.cf and master.cf configuration files.
• application_event_drain_time (100s) — how long the postkick(1) command waits for a request to enter the Postfix daemon process input buffer before giving up. one hundred seconds of patience, then she's out 🫡
• import_environment (see postconf -d output) — the list of environment variables that a privileged Postfix process will import from a non-Postfix parent process, or name=value environment overrides.
• queue_directory (see postconf -d output) — the location of the Postfix top-level queue directory.

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📁 FILES 📁

• /var/spool/postfix/private, private class endpoints 🔒
• /var/spool/postfix/public, public class endpoints 🌐

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• qmgr(8), queue manager trigger protocol
• pickup(8), local pickup daemon
• postconf(5), configuration parameters

go read these next, they're the rest of the lore ✨

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📜 LICENSE 📜

the Secure Mailer license must be distributed with this software. periodt. don't strip the license, that's not the vibe 🙅♀️

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💖 AUTHOR(S) 💖

• Wietse Venema IBM T.J. Watson Research P.O. Box 704 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA
• Wietse Venema Google, Inc. 111 8th Avenue New York, NY 10011, USA

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okay that's the whole page bestie 🫶 this was POSTKICK(1) from the General Commands Manual — the footer just says her name and honestly? she doesn't need a version number to be iconic. go kick a service, you got this 👑💅✨