The DELIVER facility permits users to perform automatic filtering on their incoming messages based on the presence of arbitrary substrings in the From:, Subject:, or other header lines, e.g., forward certain messages, direct certain messages to particular VMS MAIL folders, direct certain messages straight to files, generate automatic replies, execute a DCL command upon receipt of certain messages, etc.; a complete description of the use of this facility can be found in the PMDF User's Guide.

When PMDF is initially installed, the DELIVER facility is enabled: a user triggers the DELIVER facility for mail handled by PMDF by creating an appropriate mail.delivery file in their own default login directory. Any necessary processing is performed by batch jobs; if a user does not specify a batch queue, then the default DELIVER batch queue specified during PMDF installation (pointed to by the DELIVER_BATCH logical name) will be used. The system manager can unconditionally disable the use of DELIVER via the PMDF option USE_MAIL_DELIVERY or can choose a different name for DELIVER files via the PMDF option MAIL_DELIVERY_FILENAME; see Section 7.2.