Contents
What's a Mail System anyway?
Mail software is normally classed into one of two groups:
There has been a great deal of confusion caused by people who fail to realize the difference between a mail transfer agent and a user agent, or even that a difference exists!
- A user agent (UA) is a program that is responsible for providing a "user friendly" interface for reading or writing mail.
- A mail transfer agent (MTA) is a program or system to which you or your user agent entrusts a message for delivery among hosts and servers on the Internet (and/or other kinds of networks) to someone else's user agent.
*Note: MMDF has been decommissioned as of August 2002 and has been replaced with Sendmail.
The MTA that ICS runs is called Sendmail. Sendmail is an open-source Internet MTA which runs on various flavours of UNIX. Sendmail supports a wide variety of user agents (UA's), including:
- RAND MH,
- University of Washington Pine,
- Qualcomm Eudora,
- Microsoft Outlook, and
- Netscape Messenger.
- MUTT
- Mush
- Elm
The Mail Delivery Process
An MTA normally delivers your mail by appending it to a file called your mail spool file. Your mail user agent (UA) picks up the mail from this spool file and moves it into files or folders in your account. This mail pickup can occur when your UA reads the spool file directly, or when it retrieves your mail over the network (e.g., by contacting the ICS POPor IMAP server).
Procmail Tips
Sendmail provides mail forwarding capability with .forward or .procmailrc file. .forward file also allows users to set vacation programs (previously known as ontrip and offtrip).Our version of Sendmail has been compiled with Procmail. Procmail is a mail processor which allows users to filter, forward, and manipulate incoming email.
Please take a look at our Procmail Tips page for more detailed information.
