Contents
Installed Programs: mail, mailx and nail
Installed Libraries: None
Installed Directories: None
mailx-12.5
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. It 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.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.
Package Information
Download (HTTP): https://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/BLFS/mailx/heirloom-mailx_12.5.orig.tar.gz
Download MD5 sum: 29a6033ef1412824d02eb9d9213cb1f2
Download size: 317 KB
Estimated disk space required: 3.2 MB
Estimated build time: less than 0.1 SBU
Additional Downloads
Heirloom mailx Dependencies
Optional
nss-3.94, MIT Kerberos V5-1.21.2 (for IMAP GSSAPI authentication), and an MTA
Installation of Heirloom mailx
Note
This package does not support parallel build.
Install Heirloom mailx by running the following commands.
patch -Np1 -i ../heirloom-mailx-12.5-fixes-1.patch &&
sed 's@<openssl@<openssl-1.0/openssl@' \
-i openssl.c fio.c makeconfig &&
make -j1 LDFLAGS+="-L /usr/lib/openssl/" \
SENDMAIL=/usr/sbin/sendmailThis 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/heirloom-mailx-12.5 && install -v -m644 README /usr/share/doc/heirloom-mailx-12.5
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
Configuration Information
For displaying mails, mailx
uses a pager program. Since the default of pg
is not available on a LFS system, its required to
specify which pager is to use. By default, there is
more and the more comfortable
less installed. If the
variable PAGER is not set in /etc/profile
or ~/.bash_profile, or if it
should be another pager just for reading mails, it can be
set system wide in /etc/nail.rc:
echo "set PAGER=<more|less>" >> /etc/nail.rcor individually for the actual user in ~/.mailrc:
echo "set PAGER=<more|less>" >> ~/.mailrcOther interesting options to set in the config files might be EDITOR and MAILDIR.
If not set in the environment for other packages, the default editor can be set by:
echo "set EDITOR=<vim|nano|...>" >> /etc/nail.rcDepending on which kind of MTA is installed, it might be required to set the MAILDIR variable so mailx is able to find the mails:
echo "set MAILDIR=Maildir" >> /etc/nail.rc