SPOST(8mh)

💌 SPOST(8mh) — the little go-between that hands your mail to sendmail 💌

okay bestie, gather round, because this is spost from mmh-0.4 and she is literally the backstage crew of your email life 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

spost — feed a message to sendmail 🍽️✨

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

spost [-verbose | -noverbose] file [-Version] [-help]

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

So here's the tea, bestie: spost is the program that send calls to feed the message sitting in file to sendmail for delivery. 🫶

And ngl? A LOT of the stuff that send's own manual page takes credit for is actually done by spost, with send just sitting there acting like a preprocessor. 🙈 So it's spost who's the real main character here — she parses the various header fields, she appends the From: and Date: lines, and then she feeds the message to the MTA. Periodt. ✨

Heads up: spost will not normally be called directly by the user. She's behind-the-scenes iconic, not front-of-house. 💅

spost goes digging through the To:, Cc:, Bcc:, Dcc:, Fcc:, and Resent-xxx: header lines of the message you specified, hunting for destination addresses. 🔍

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

sendmail -i [-v] recipients ...

Now, the Bcc: situation, because this is where it gets spicy 🌶️:

• If a Bcc: field shows up, its addresses get used for delivery, and the Bcc: field gets removed from the message that goes out to the sighted recipients. 👀
• The blind recipients receive a newly constructed message with a copy of the original message attached. MIME rules are used for encapsulation. (and yes, spost invokes send to send the Bcc message — it's a whole relay race 🏃♀️)

And the Dcc: situation:

• If a Dcc: field shows up, the field gets removed before the message is sent. The Dcc recipient still receives the message, but without being mentioned in the recipient headers. 🤫

The contrast between the two, since everyone asks: with Bcc, the blind recipient gets a special, newly constructed message that contains the original message as an attachment. With Dcc, the recipient gets the same original message as all the sighted recipients. Different vibes entirely. 💖

So which one do you use?

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

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

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

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🔊 the verbose thing

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

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💌 where your From: line comes from

If you specify a From: line manually in the message draft, it will be used as provided. Easy. 🫶

If there's 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>

And if you set the $SIGNATURE environment variable? Its value overrides the full name from the GECOS field. 💅

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👑 when a Sender: header shows up

A Sender: header will be added in two cases:

1. 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.) 🙈
2. 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. ✨

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🌐 address glow-up

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. 🦋

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📁 the Fcc filing

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

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📂 FILES 📂

None

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🎀 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.

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

send(1), mh-mail(5), mh-alias(5), mh-tailor(5), refile(1), Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages (RFC-822)

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🌈 DEFAULTS 🌈

-noverbose

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🧚 CONTEXT 🧚

None

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💀 BUGS 💀

None

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📜 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. glow-up fr fr 🔥

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 this was MH.6.8, dated 2019-01-06, and it's the SPOST(8mh) manual — go forth and let spost handle the mail logistics while you take the credit 💅✨