Beyond Linux® From Scratch - Version 6.3

Chapter 18. Mail/News Clients

Heirloom mailx-12.2

Introduction to Heirloom mailx

The Heirloom mailx package (formerly known as the Nail package) contains mailx, a command-line Mail User Agent derived from Berkeley Mail which is intended to provide the functionality of the POSIX mailx command with additional support for MIME messages, IMAP (including caching), POP3, SMTP, S/MIME, message threading/sorting, scoring, and filtering. Heirloom mailx is especially useful for writing scripts and batch processing.

Package Information

Heirloom mailx Dependencies

Optional

OpenSSL-0.9.8g or NSS-3.11.7, Heimdal-1.1 or MIT Kerberos V5-1.6 (for IMAP GSSAPI authentication), and an MTA

User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/mailx

Installation of Heirloom mailx

Install Heirloom mailx by running the following commands. 

make SENDMAIL=/usr/sbin/sendmail

This package does not come with a test suite.

Now, as the root user: 

make PREFIX=/usr UCBINSTALL=/usr/bin/install install &&
ln -v -sf mailx /usr/bin/mail &&
ln -v -sf mailx /usr/bin/nail &&
install -v -m755 -d /usr/share/doc/mailx-12.2 &&
install -v -m644 README mailx.1.html /usr/share/doc/mailx-12.2

Command Explanations

make SENDMAIL=/usr/sbin/sendmail: This changes the default MTA path of /usr/lib/sendmail.

make PREFIX=/usr UCBINSTALL=/usr/bin/install install: This changes the default installation path of /usr/local and the default install command path of /usr/ucb.

Configuring Heirloom mailx

Config Files

/etc/nail.rc, ~/.mailrc and ~/.nailrc

Contents

Installed Programs: mail, mailx and nail
Installed Libraries: None
Installed Directories: None

Short Descriptions

mailx

is a command-line mail user agent compatible with the mailx command found on commercial Unix versions.

mail

is a symbolic link to mailx.

nail

is a symbolic link to mailx.

Last updated on 2007-04-04 14:42:53 -0500