Re: How is maildrop called from qmail ?

Philip Rhoades <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> [maildrop] just worked and I never really worried about it.  Now I am
> actually trying to understand how the two programs interact -
> maildrop doesn't run as a daemon and everything I have found just
> says that it takes its input from StdIn which doesn't help me
> understand the mechanism

maildrop, and more generally all delivery agent programs other than the
built-in maildir/mbox ones in qmail-local, are "integrated" into qmail by
incorporating a delivery instruction in a .qmail file.  A program delivery
line looks like this:

  |program-name-or-path [args...]

That tells qmail-local to invoke that program with the message being handed
off attached to the programs stdin.  So the program reads the message from
stdin and does whatever the program is supposed to do with it.

There's a special case where the system administrator can make the system-wide
default delivery instruction such a program delivery, in which case it won't
show up in the .qmail file(s).

See the qmail manpages for more details -- `man dot-qmail` for starters, then
follow all the "see also" links in that one.

Charles
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