SPOST(8)

📦 version 0.4, in alpine 3.24, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable

💌 spost — feed a message to sendmail 💌

okay bestie, welcome to the SPOST(8) page from the [mmh-0.4] era — yes, that spost, the little icon that feeds your message to sendmail. I'm giving you the whole manual with zero skipped details and maximum group-chat energy. 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

spost — feed a message to sendmail. 💅

💌 SYNOPSIS 💌

spost [-verbose | -noverbose] file [-Version] [-help]
  • -verbose — turns on informational messages. For example, the -v switch gets added to the sendmail invocation. 🗣️
  • -noverbose — the default setting, per DEFAULTS. That's the tea. 🎀
  • file — the message file that spost feeds to sendmail, bestie. 💖
  • -Version — it's in the synopsis; this page doesn't give extra details, so no invented lore. 🙈
  • -help — also in the synopsis; again, no extra description on this page. 🦋

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so spost is the program called by send to feed the message in file to sendmail for delivery. In fact, many of the features attributed to send in its manual page are performed by spost, with send acting as a preprocessor. The way that works: it is spost which parses the various header fields, appends From: and Date: lines, and finally feeds the message to the MTA. spost will not normally be called directly by the user. periodt. 💅

spost searches the To:, Cc:, Bcc:, Dcc:, Fcc:, and Resent-xxx: header lines of the specified message for destination addresses.

spost invokes sendmail with all recipients, except the blind ones (Bcc:), as command line arguments:

sendmail -i [-v] recipients ...

If a Bcc: field is encountered, its addresses will be used for delivery, and the Bcc: field will be removed from the message sent to sighted recipients. The blind recipients will receive a newly constructed message with a copy of the original message attached. MIME rules are used for encapsulation. (spost invokes send to send the Bcc message.) 👀

If a Dcc: field is encountered, the field will be removed before sending the message. The Dcc recipient will receive the message as well, but without being mentioned in the recipient headers.

In contrast to Bcc, the Dcc recipient receives the same original message as all the sighted recipients, whereas the Bcc recipient receives a special, newly constructed message, which contains the original message as an attachment.

Bcc is probably a good choice for a message with both sighted and invisible recipients (e.g. inform someone privately about the message being sent). Dcc is probably a good choice for a message to a group of only invisible recipients (e.g. invite to a party). 🎉

The Aliasfile profile entry can be used to specify one or more files that spost should take aliases from.

Aliasing is done on any address field. Those are: From:, To:, Cc:, Bcc: and Dcc:, or the Resent-xxx: versions of these fields.

The -verbose switch enables informational messages. For example, the -v switch will be added to the sendmail invocation.

If you specify a From: line manually in the message draft, it will be used as provided. If there is no From: line in the draft, spost uses the Default-From profile entry, if set. Otherwise spost constructs the From: line from the user's login name and the full name from the GECOS field of the passwd file. An example is From: Dan Harkless <dan>.

If you set the $SIGNATURE environment variable, its value overrides the full name from the GECOS field. 🖊️

A Sender: header will be added in two cases. First: if the From: line given in the draft contains one or more addresses, of which none is the user's own one, as defined by Alternate-Mailboxes. (The sender address will then be determined equally as described above for the absent From: header.) Second: if the From: line contains multiple addresses, of which at least one is the user's own address. The first own address will be used as the sender address.

Note that this applies equally to Resent-From: lines in messages sent with dist.

spost tries to fully qualify the addresses in every address field. Your MTA is supposed to add the correct domain, if there is none after aliasing.

The draft is filed to the folders in the Fcc headers by refile.

🎀 FILES 🎀

None — literally none. 💀

🦋 PROFILE COMPONENTS 🦋

  • Aliasfile: — for default alias files.
  • Default-From: — the default From header.
  • Alternate-Mailboxes: — the user's addresses.
  • Sendmail: — the path name to the sendmail program.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

⭐ DEFAULTS ⭐

-noverbose

🌈 CONTEXT 🌈

None.

💀 BUGS 💀

None.

👑 HISTORY 👑

The spost in mmh-0.1 used sendmail's -t flag to have sendmail extract the recipients from the message headers. Now, it passes the recipients as command line arguments. This provides better compatibility to other sendmail implementations.

💖 final vibe check: source/version MH.6.8, dated 2019-01-06 — that's the SPOST(8) tea, bye bestie! 💅

📦 where this page comes from