mailx-12.5

#### Beyond Linux® From Scratch (systemd Edition) - Version r13.0-475

### Chapter 19. Mail/News Clients

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# 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

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

- Required patch: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/patches/blfs/svn/heirloom-mailx-12.5-fixes-1.patch

### Heirloom mailx Dependencies

#### Optional

nss-3.123.1, MIT Kerberos V5-1.22.2 (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/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/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 sendmail to `/usr/sbin/sendmail`, instead of using `/usr/lib/sendmail`.

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

## Configuring Heirloom mailx

### Config Files

`/etc/nail.rc` and `~/.mailrc`

### Configuration Information

For displaying mail, mailx uses a pager program. Since the default of pg is not available on a LFS system, you need to specify which pager mailx is supposed to use. By default, the more and the more comfortable less commands are installed. If the `PAGER` environment variable is not set in `/etc/profile` or `~/.bash_profile`, or if it should be set to another pager specifically for reading mails, it can be set system wide in `/etc/nail.rc` as the `root` user:

    echo "set PAGER=<more|less>" >> /etc/nail.rc

or for the current user in `~/.mailrc`:

    echo "set PAGER=<more|less>" >> ~/.mailrc

Other interesting options to set in the config files might be EDITOR and MAILDIR.

If the default editor is not set in the environment for other packages, it can be set by running the following command as the `root` user:

    echo "set EDITOR=<vim|nano|...>" >> /etc/nail.rc

Depending on which kind of MTA is installed, it might be necessary to set the MAILDIR variable so that mailx is able to find mail as the `root` user:

    echo "set MAILDIR=Maildir" >> /etc/nail.rc

## 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 variants
mail | is a symbolic link to mailx
nail | is a symbolic link to mailx

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