PMDF System Manager's Guide

The available options are:

FORCE_CONTENT_LENGTH (0 or 1)

If FORCE_CONTENT_LENGTH=1, then PMDF adds a Content-length: header line to messages delivered to the L channel, and causes the channel not to use the >From syntax when From is at the beginning of the line. This makes local UNIX mail compatible with Sun's newer mail tools, but potentially incompatible with other UNIX mail tools.

FORWARD_FORMAT (string)

This option specifies where to find users' .forward files. The string %u means to substitute in each user's username; the string %h means to substitute in each user's home directory. The default behavior, if this option is not explicitly specified, corresponds to:

FORWARD_FORMAT=%h/.forward

REPEAT_COUNT (integer)

SLEEP_TIME (integer)

In case the user's new mail file is locked by another process when PMDF tries to deliver the new mail, these options provide a way to control the number and frequency of retries the local channel program should attempt. If the file can not be opened after the number of retries specified, the messages will remain in the local queue and the next run of the local channel will attempt to deliver the new messages again. The REPEAT_COUNT option controls how many times the channel programs will attempt to open the mail file before giving up. REPEAT_COUNT defaults to 30. The SLEEP_TIME option controls how long in seconds the channel program waits between attempts. SLEEP_TIME defaults to 2 (two seconds between retries).

SHELL_TIMEOUT (integer)

The SHELL_TIMEOUT option can be used to control how long in seconds the channel will wait for a user's shell command in a .forward file to complete. Upon such time outs, the message will be returned back to the original sender with an error message along the lines of "Timeout waiting for ...'s shell command ... to complete". The default value is 600 (corresponding to 10 minutes).

SHELL_TMPDIR (directory-specification)

The SHELL_TMPDIR option can be used to control where the local channel creates its temporary files when delivering to a shell command. By default, such temporary files are created in users' home directories. Via this option the PMDF manager can instead choose to have the temporary files created in some other directory; e.g.:

SHELL_TMPDIR=/tmp