NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Options

-: spec

Explicitly control which of the Resource files shall be sourced (loaded): if the letter ‘s’ is (case-insensitively) part of the spec then the system wide /etc/mail.rc is sourced, likewise the letter ‘u’ controls sourcing of the user's personal ~/.mailrc file, whereas the letters ‘-’ and ‘/’ explicitly forbid sourcing of any resource files. Scripts should use this option: to avoid environmental noise they should “detach” from any configuration and create a script-specific environment, setting any of the desired INTERNAL VARIABLES via -S and running configurating commands via -X. This option overrides -n.

-A account

Executes an account command for the given user email account after program startup is complete (all resource files are loaded, any -S setting is being established; only -X commands have not been evaluated yet). Being a special incarnation of defined macros for the purpose of bundling longer-lived settings, activating such an email account also switches to the accounts primary system mailbox (most likely the inbox). If the operation fails the program will exit if it is used non-interactively, or if any of errexit or posix are set.

-a file[

=input-charset[

#output-charset

]

]

Attach file to the message (for compose mode opportunities refer to ~@ and ~^). Filename transformations (also see file) will be performed, except that shell variables are not expanded. Shall file not be accessible but contain a ‘=’ character, then anything before the last ‘=’ will be used as the filename, anything thereafter as a character set specification.

If an input character set is specified, but no output character set, then the given input character set is fixed as-is, and no conversion will be applied; giving the empty string or the special string hyphen-minus ‘-’ will be treated as if ttycharset has been specified (the default).

If an output character set has also been given then the conversion will be performed exactly as specified and on-the-fly, not considering the file type and content. As an exception, if the output character set is specified as the empty string or hyphen-minus ‘-’, then the default conversion algorithm (see Character sets) is applied (therefore no conversion is performed on-the-fly, file will be MIME-classified and its contents will be inspected first) — without support for character set conversions (features does not include the term ‘+iconv’) only this argument is supported.

-B

([Obsolete]: Mail will always use line-buffered output, to gain line-buffered input even in batch mode enable batch mode via -#.)

-b addr

Send a blind carbon copy to address, if the setting of expandaddr, one of the INTERNAL VARIABLES, allows; the ‘shquote’ expandaddr flag is supported. The option may be used multiple times. Also see the section On sending mail, and non-interactive mode.

-C "field: body"

Create a custom header which persists for an entire session. A custom header consists of the field name followed by a colon ‘:’ and the field content body, e.g., ‘-C "Blah: Neminem laede; imo omnes, quantum potes, juva"’. Standard header field names cannot be overwritten by custom headers. Runtime adjustable custom headers are available via the variable customhdr, and in compose mode ~^, one of the COMMAND ESCAPES, is the most flexible and powerful option to manage message headers. This option may be used multiple times.

-c addr

Just like -b, except it places the argument in the list of carbon copies.

-D

([Option]) Startup with disconnected set.

-d

Almost enable a sandbox mode with the internal variable debug; the same can be achieved via ‘-S debug’ or ‘set debug’.

-E

set skipemptybody and thus discard messages with an empty message part body.

-e

Just check if mail is present (in the system inbox or the one specified via -f): if yes, return an exit status of zero, a non-zero value otherwise. To restrict the set of mails to consider in this evaluation a message specification can be added with the option -L.

-F

Save the message to send in a file named after the local part of the first recipient's address (instead of in record).

-f

Read in the contents of the user's secondary mailbox MBOX (or the specified file) for processing; when Mail is quit, it writes undeleted messages back to this file (but be aware of the hold option). The optional file argument will undergo some special Filename transformations (as via file). Note that file is not an argument to the flag -f, but is instead taken from the command line after option processing has been completed. In order to use a file that starts with a hyphen-minus, prefix with a relative path, as in ‘./-hyphenbox.mbox’.

-H

Display a summary of headers for the given file (depending on -u, inbox or MAIL, or as specified via -f). A configurable summary view is available via the option -L. This mode does not honour showlast.

-h

Show a short usage summary.

-i

set ignore to ignore tty interrupt signals.

-L spec

Display a summary of headers of all messages that match the given spec in the file found by the same algorithm used by -H, then exit. See the section Specifying messages for the format of spec. This mode does not honour showlast.

If the -e option has been given in addition no header summary is produced, but Mail will instead indicate via its exit status whether spec matched any messages (‘0’) or not (‘1’); note that any verbose output is suppressed in this mode and must instead be enabled explicitly (e.g., by using the option -v).

-M type

Special send mode that will flag standard input with the MIME ‘Content-Type:’ set to the given type and use it as the main message body. [v15 behaviour may differ] Using this option will bypass processing of message-inject-head and message-inject-tail. Also see -q, -m, -t.

-m file

Special send mode that will MIME classify the specified file and use it as the main message body. [v15 behaviour may differ] Using this option will bypass processing of message-inject-head and message-inject-tail. Also see -q, -M, -t.

-N

inhibit the initial display of message headers when reading mail or editing a mailbox folder by calling unset for the internal variable header.

-n

Standard flag that inhibits reading the system wide /etc/mail.rc upon startup. The option -: allows more control over the startup sequence; also see Resource files.

-q file

Special send mode that will initialize the message body with the contents of the specified file, which may be standard input ‘-’ only in non-interactive context. Also see -M, -m, -t.

-R

Any mailbox folder a.k.a. file opened will be in read-only mode.

-r from-addr

Whereas the source address that appears in the from header of a message (or in the sender header if the former contains multiple addresses) is honoured by the built-in SMTP transport, it is not used by a file-based mta (Mail-Transfer-Agent) for the RFC 5321 reverse-path used for relaying and delegating a message to its destination(s), for delivery errors etc., but it instead uses the local identity of the initiating user.

When this command line option is used the given from-addr will be assigned to the internal variable from, but in addition the command line option -f from-addr will be passed to a file-based mta whenever a message is sent. Shall from-addr include a user name the address components will be separated and the name part will be passed to a file-based mta individually via -F name.

If an empty string is passed as from-addr then the content of the variable from (or, if that contains multiple addresses, sender) will be evaluated and used for this purpose whenever the file-based mta is contacted. By default, without -r that is, neither -f nor -F command line options are used when contacting a file-based MTA, unless this automatic deduction is enforced by seting the internal variable r-option-implicit.

Remarks: many default installations and sites disallow overriding the local user identity like this unless either the MTA has been configured accordingly or the user is member of a group with special privileges. Passing an invalid address will cause an error.

-S var[

=value

]

set (or, with a prefix string ‘no’, as documented in INTERNAL VARIABLES, unset) variable and optionally assign value, if supported; [v15 behaviour may differ] the entire expression is evaluated as if specified within dollar-single-quotes (see Shell-style argument quoting) if the internal variable v15-compat is set. If the operation fails the program will exit if any of errexit or posix are set. Settings established via -S cannot be changed from within Resource files or an account switch initiated by -A. They will become mutable again before commands registered via -X are executed.

-s subject

Specify the subject of the message to be sent. Newline (NL) and carriage-return (CR) bytes are invalid and will be normalized to space (SP) characters.

-t

The message given (on standard input) is expected to contain, separated from the message body by an empty line, one or multiple message headers. Headers can span multiple consecutive lines if follow lines start with any amount of whitespace. A line starting with the number sign ‘#’ in the first column is ignored. Message recipients can be given via the message headers ‘To:’, ‘Cc:’, ‘Bcc:’ or ‘Fcc:’, they will be added to any recipients specified on the command line, and are likewise subject to expandaddr validity checks. If a message subject is specified via ‘Subject:’ then it will be used in favour of one given on the command line.

More optional headers are ‘Reply-To:’ (possibly overriding reply-to), ‘Sender:’ (sender), ‘From:’ (from and / or option -r). ‘Message-ID:’, ‘In-Reply-To:’, ‘References:’ and ‘Mail-Followup-To:’, by default created automatically dependent on message context, will be used if specified (a special address massage will however still occur for the latter). Any other custom header field (also see -C, customhdr and ~^) is passed through entirely unchanged, and in conjunction with the options -~ or -# it is possible to embed COMMAND ESCAPES. Also see -M, -m, -q.

-u user

Initially read the primary system mailbox of user, appropriate privileges presumed; effectively identical to ‘-f %user’.

-V

Show Mails version and exit. The command version will also show the list of features: ‘$ mail -Xversion -Xx’.

-v

setting the internal variable verbose enables display of some informational context messages. Using it twice increases the level of verbosity.

-X cmd

Add the given (or multiple for a multiline argument) cmd to the list of commands to be executed, as a last step of program startup, before normal operation starts. This is the only possibility to execute commands in non-interactive mode when reading startup files has been disabled. The commands will be evaluated as a unit, just as via source. Correlates with -# and errexit.

-~

Enable COMMAND ESCAPES in compose mode even in non-interactive use cases. This can be used to, e.g., automatically format the composed message text before sending the message:

$ ( echo 'line    one. Word.     Word2.';\ 
    echo '~| /usr/bin/fmt -tuw66' ) |\ 
  LC_ALL=C mail -d~:/ -Sttycharset=utf-8 bob@exam.ple
    

-#

Enables batch mode: standard input is made line buffered, the complete set of (interactive) commands is available, processing of COMMAND ESCAPES is enabled in compose mode, and diverse INTERNAL VARIABLES are adjusted for batch necessities, exactly as if done via set: emptystart, noerrexit, noheader, noposix, quiet, sendwait, typescript-mode as well as MAIL, MBOX and inbox (the latter three to /dev/null). The following prepares an email message in a batched dry run:

$ LC_ALL=C printf 'm bob\n~s ubject\nText\n~.\nx\n' |\ 
  LC_ALL=C mail -d#:/ -X'alias bob bob@exam.ple'
    

-.

This flag forces termination of option processing in order to prevent “option injection” (attacks). It also forcefully puts Mail into send mode, see On sending mail, and non-interactive mode.

A starter

On sending mail, and non-interactive mode

# Via sendmail(1) 
$ mail -s ubject -a ttach.txt bill@exam.ple 
 
# But... try it in an isolated dry-run mode (-d) first 
$ LC_ALL=C mail -d -:/ -Ssendwait -Sttycharset=utf8 \ 
   -b bcc@exam.ple -c cc@exam.ple \ 
   -Sfullnames -. \ 
   '(Lovely) Bob <bob@exam.ple>' eric@exam.ple 
 
# With SMTP 
$ LC_ALL=C mail -d -:/ -Sv15-compat -Ssendwait -Sttycharset=utf8 \ 
    -S mta=smtps://mylogin@exam.ple:465 -Ssmtp-auth=none \ 
    -S from=scriptreply@exam.ple \ 
    -a /etc/mail.rc \ 
    -. eric@exam.ple < /tmp/letter.txt

$ echo bla | mail -Sexpandaddr -s test ./mbox.mbox 
$ echo bla | mail -Sexpandaddr -s test '|cat >> ./mbox.mbox' 
$ echo safe | LC_ALL=C \ 
    mail -:/ -Sv15-compat -Ssendwait -Sttycharset=utf8 \ 
      -Sexpandaddr=fail,-all,+addr,failinvaddr -s test \ 
      -. bob@exam.ple

? alias  cohorts  bill jkf mark kridle@ucbcory ~/cohorts.mbox 
? alias  mark  mark@exam.ple

$ env LC_ALL=C mail -:/ \ 
    -Sv15-compat -Ssendwait -Sttycharset=utf-8 \ 
    -Sexpandaddr=fail,-all,failinvaddr \ 
    -S mta=smtps://mylogin@exam.ple:465 -Ssmtp-auth=login \ 
    -S from=scriptreply@exam.ple \ 
    -s 'Subject to go' -a attachment_file \ 
    -Sfullnames -. \ 
    'Recipient 1 <rec1@exam.ple>' rec2@exam.ple \ 
    < content_file

$ mail -d -Squiet -Semptystart 
"/var/spool/mail/user": 0 messages 
? mail "Recipient 1 <rec1@exam.ple>", rec2@exam.ple 
... 
? # Will do the right thing (tm) 
? m rec1@exam.ple rec2@exam.ple

On reading mail, and interactive mode

HTML mail and MIME attachments

? if [ "$features" !% +filter-html-tagsoup ] 
?   #set pipe-text/html='@* elinks -force-html -dump 1' 
?   set pipe-text/html='@* lynx -stdin -dump -force_html' 
?   # Display HTML as plain text instead 
?   #set pipe-text/html=@ 
? endif 
? mimetype @ application/mathml+xml mathml 
? wysh set pipe-application/pdf='@&=@ \ 
    trap "rm -f \"${MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY}\"" EXIT;\ 
    trap "trap \"\" INT QUIT TERM; exit 1" INT QUIT TERM;\ 
    mupdf "${MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY}"'

Mailing lists

? set followup-to followup-to-honour=ask-yes \ 
    reply-to-honour=ask-yes 
? wysh mlist a1@b1.c1 a2@b2.c2 '.*@lists\.c3$' 
? mlsubscribe a4@b4.c4 exact@lists.c3

Signed and encrypted messages with S/MIME

? certsave FILENAME 
? set smime-encrypt-USER@HOST=FILENAME \ 
    smime-cipher-USER@HOST=AES256

? set smime-sign-cert=ME@exam.ple.paired \ 
    smime-sign-digest=SHA512 \ 
    smime-sign

On URL syntax and credential lookup

• If no ‘USER’ has been given in the URL the variables user-HOST and user are looked up. If no such variable(s) can be found then Mail will, when enforced by the [Option]al variables netrc-lookup-HOST or netrc-lookup, search The .netrc file of the user for a ‘HOST’ specific entry which provides a ‘login’ name: this lookup will only succeed if unambiguous (one possible matching entry for ‘HOST’).
  If there is still no ‘USER’ then Mail will fall back to the user who is supposed to run Mail, the identity of which has been fixated during Mail startup and is known to be a valid user on the current host.
• Authentication: unless otherwise noted this will lookup the PROTOCOL-auth-USER@HOST, PROTOCOL-auth-HOST, PROTOCOL-auth variable chain, falling back to a protocol-specific default should this have no success.
• If no ‘PASSWORD’ has been given in the URL, then if the ‘USER’ has been found through the [Option]al netrc-lookup that may have already provided the password, too. Otherwise the variable chain password-USER@HOST, password-HOST, password is looked up and used if existent.
  Afterwards the complete [Option]al variable chain netrc-lookup-USER@HOST, netrc-lookup-HOST, netrc-lookup is looked up. If set, the netrc cache is searched for a password only (multiple user accounts for a single machine may exist as well as a fallback entry without user but with a password).
  If at that point there is still no password available, but the (protocols') chosen authentication type requires a password, then in interactive mode the user will be prompted on the terminal.

set mta=smtp://USER:PASS@HOST smtp-use-starttls \ 
    smime-sign smime-sign-cert=+smime.pair

Encrypted network communication

$ </dev/null openssl s_client -showcerts -connect \ 
    the-server.example:pop3s 2>&1 | tee log.txt

shortcut encpop1 pop3s://pop1.exam.ple 
 
shortcut encpop2 pop3://pop2.exam.ple 
set pop3-use-starttls-pop2.exam.ple 
 
set mta=smtps://smtp.exam.ple:465 
set mta=smtp://smtp.exam.ple smtp-use-starttls

wysh set tls-config-pairs-lion@exam.ple='MinProtocol=TLSv1.1,\ 
    CipherString=TLSv1.2:!aNULL:!eNULL:\ 
      ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:\ 
      DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:@STRENGTH'

Character sets

Message states

‘new’

Message has neither been viewed nor moved to any other state. Such messages are retained even in the primary system mailbox.

‘unread’

Message has neither been viewed nor moved to any other state, but the message was present already when the mailbox has been opened last: Such messages are retained even in the primary system mailbox.

‘read’

The message has been processed by one of the following commands: ~f, ~m, ~F, ~M, copy, mbox, next, pipe, Print, print, top, Type, type, undelete. The commands dp and dt will always try to automatically “step” and type the “next” logical message, and may thus mark multiple messages as read, the delete command will do so if the internal variable autoprint is set.

Except when the exit command is used, messages that are in a primary system mailbox and are in ‘read’ state when the mailbox is left will be saved in the secondary mailbox MBOX unless the internal variable hold it set.

‘deleted’

The message has been processed by one of the following commands: delete, dp, dt. Only undelete can be used to access such messages.

‘preserved’

The message has been processed by a preserve command and it will be retained in its current location.

‘saved’

The message has been processed by one of the following commands: save or write. Unless when the exit command is used, messages that are in a primary system mailbox and are in ‘saved’ state when the mailbox is left will be deleted; they will be saved in the secondary mailbox MBOX when the internal variable keepsave is set.

answered

Mark messages as having been answered.

draft

Mark messages as being a draft.

flag

Mark messages which need special attention.

Specifying messages

.

The current message, the so-called “dot”.

;

The message that was previously the current message; needs to be quoted.

,

The parent message of the current message, that is the message with the Message-ID given in the ‘In-Reply-To:’ field or the last entry of the ‘References:’ field of the current message.

-

The previous undeleted message, or the previous deleted message for the undelete command; In sorted or ‘thread’ed mode, the previous such message in the according order.

+

The next undeleted message, or the next deleted message for the undelete command; In sorted or ‘thread’ed mode, the next such message in the according order.

^

The first undeleted message, or the first deleted message for the undelete command; In sorted or ‘thread’ed mode, the first such message in the according order.

$

The last message; In sorted or ‘thread’ed mode, the last such message in the according order. Needs to be quoted.

&x

In ‘thread’ed sort mode, selects the message addressed with x, where x is any other message specification, and all messages from the thread that begins at it. Otherwise it is identical to x. If x is omitted, the thread beginning with the current message is selected.

*

All messages.

`

All messages that were included in the Message list arguments of the previous command; needs to be quoted.

x-y

An inclusive range of message numbers. Selectors that may also be used as endpoints include any of .;-+^$.

address

A case-insensitive “any substring matches” search against the ‘From:’ header, which will match addresses (too) even if showname is set (and POSIX says “any address as shown in a header summary shall be matchable in this form”); However, if the allnet variable is set, only the local part of the address is evaluated for the comparison, not ignoring case, and the setting of showname is completely ignored. For finer control and match boundaries use the ‘@’ search expression.

/string

All messages that contain string in the subject field (case ignored according to locale). See also the searchheaders variable. If string is empty, the string from the previous specification of that type is used again.

[

@name-list

]@expr

All messages that contain the given case-insensitive search expression; If the [Option]al regular expression support is available expr will be interpreted as (an extended) one if any of the “magical” regular expression characters ‘^[]*+?|$’ is seen (see re_format(7)). If the optional @name-list part is missing the search is restricted to the subject field body, but otherwise name-list specifies a comma-separated list of header fields to search, e.g.,

'@to,from,cc@Someone i ought to know'

In order to search for a string that includes a ‘@’ (commercial at) character the name-list is effectively non-optional, but may be given as the empty string. Also, specifying an empty search expression will effectively test for existence of the given header fields. Some special header fields may be abbreviated: ‘f’, ‘t’, ‘c’, ‘b’ and ‘s’ will match ‘From’, ‘To’, ‘Cc’, ‘Bcc’ and ‘Subject’, respectively and case-insensitively. [Option]ally, and just like expr, name-list will be interpreted as (an extended) regular expression if any of the “magical” regular expression characters is seen.

The special names ‘header’ or ‘<’ can be used to search in (all of) the header(s) of the message, and the special names ‘body’ or ‘>’ and ‘text’ or ‘=’ will perform full text searches – whereas the former searches only the body, the latter also searches the message header ([v15 behaviour may differ] this mode yet brute force searches over the entire decoded content of messages, including administrativa strings).

This specification performs full text comparison, but even with regular expression support it is almost impossible to write a search expression that safely matches only a specific address domain. To request that the body content of the header is treated as a list of addresses, and to strip those down to the plain email address which the search expression is to be matched against, prefix the effective name-list with a tilde ‘~’:

'@~f,c@@a\.safe\.domain\.match$'

:c

All messages of state or with matching condition ‘c’, where ‘c’ is one or multiple of the following colon modifiers:

a

answered messages (cf. the variable markanswered).

d

‘deleted’ messages (for the undelete and from commands only).

f

flagged messages.

L

Messages with receivers that match mlsubscribed addresses.

l

Messages with receivers that match mlisted addresses.

n

‘new’ messages.

o

Old messages (any not in state ‘read’ or ‘new’).

r

‘read’ messages.

S

[Option] Messages with unsure spam classification (see Handling spam).

s

[Option] Messages classified as spam.

t

Messages marked as draft.

u

‘unread’ messages.

'("name" "source" "local-part" "domain-part")'

(criterion)

All messages that satisfy the given criterion.

(criterion1 criterion2 ... criterionN)

All messages that satisfy all of the given criteria.

(or criterion1 criterion2)

All messages that satisfy either criterion1 or criterion2, or both. To connect more than two criteria using ‘or’ specifications have to be nested using additional parentheses, as with ‘(or a (or b c))’, since ‘(or a b c)’ really means ‘((a or b) and c)’. For a simple ‘or’ operation of independent criteria on the lowest nesting level, it is possible to achieve similar effects by using three separate criteria, as with ‘(a) (b) (c)’.

(not criterion)

All messages that do not satisfy criterion.

(bcc "string")

All messages that contain string in the envelope representation of the ‘Bcc:’ field.

(cc "string")

All messages that contain string in the envelope representation of the ‘Cc:’ field.

(from "string")

All messages that contain string in the envelope representation of the ‘From:’ field.

(subject "string")

All messages that contain string in the ‘Subject:’ field.

(to "string")

All messages that contain string in the envelope representation of the ‘To:’ field.

(header name "string")

All messages that contain string in the specified ‘Name:’ field.

(body "string")

All messages that contain string in their body.

(text "string")

All messages that contain string in their header or body.

(larger size)

All messages that are larger than size (in bytes).

(smaller size)

All messages that are smaller than size (in bytes).

(before date)

All messages that were received before date, which must be in the form ‘d[d]-mon-yyyy’, where ‘d’ denotes the day of the month as one or two digits, ‘mon’ is the name of the month – one of ‘Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec’, and ‘yyyy’ is the year as four digits, e.g., ‘28-Dec-2012’.

(on date)

All messages that were received on the specified date.

(since date)

All messages that were received since the specified date.

(sentbefore date)

All messages that were sent on the specified date.

(senton date)

All messages that were sent on the specified date.

(sentsince date)

All messages that were sent since the specified date.

()

The same criterion as for the previous search. This specification cannot be used as part of another criterion. If the previous command line contained more than one independent criterion then the last of those criteria is used.

On terminal control and line editor

‘\cA’

Go to the start of the line (mle-go-home).

‘\cB’

Move the cursor backward one character (mle-go-bwd).

‘\cD’

Forward delete the character under the cursor; quits Mail if used on the empty line unless the internal variable ignoreeof is set (mle-del-fwd).

‘\cE’

Go to the end of the line (mle-go-end).

‘\cF’

Move the cursor forward one character (mle-go-fwd).

‘\cG’

Cancel current operation, full reset. If there is an active history search or tabulator expansion then this command will first reset that, reverting to the former line content; thus a second reset is needed for a full reset in this case (mle-reset).

‘\cH’

Backspace: backward delete one character (mle-del-bwd).

‘\cI’

[Only new quoting rules] Horizontal tabulator: try to expand the word before the cursor, supporting the usual Filename transformations (mle-complete; this is affected by mle-quote-rndtrip).

‘\cJ’

Newline: commit the current line (mle-commit).

‘\cK’

Cut all characters from the cursor to the end of the line (mle-snarf-end).

‘\cL’

Repaint the line (mle-repaint).

‘\cN’

[Option] Go to the next history entry (mle-hist-fwd).

‘\cO’

([Option]ally context-dependent) Invokes the command dt.

‘\cP’

[Option] Go to the previous history entry (mle-hist-bwd).

‘\cQ’

Toggle roundtrip mode shell quotes, where produced, on and off (mle-quote-rndtrip). This setting is temporary, and will be forgotten once the command line is committed; also see shcodec.

‘\cR’

[Option] Complete the current line from (the remaining) older history entries (mle-hist-srch-bwd).

‘\cS’

[Option] Complete the current line from (the remaining) newer history entries (mle-hist-srch-fwd).

‘\cT’

Paste the snarf buffer (mle-paste).

‘\cU’

The same as ‘\cA’ followed by ‘\cK’ (mle-snarf-line).

‘\cV’

Prompts for a Unicode character (hexadecimal number without prefix, see vexpr) to be inserted (mle-prompt-char). Note this command needs to be assigned to a single-letter control code in order to become recognized and executed during input of a key-sequence (only three single-letter control codes can be used for that shortcut purpose); this control code is then special-treated and thus cannot be part of any other sequence (because it will trigger the mle-prompt-char function immediately).

‘\cW’

Cut the characters from the one preceding the cursor to the preceding word boundary (mle-snarf-word-bwd).

‘\cX’

Move the cursor forward one word boundary (mle-go-word-fwd).

‘\cY’

Move the cursor backward one word boundary (mle-go-word-bwd).

‘\c[’

Escape: reset a possibly used multibyte character input state machine and [Option]ally a lingering, incomplete key binding (mle-cancel). This command needs to be assigned to a single-letter control code in order to become recognized and executed during input of a key-sequence (only three single-letter control codes can be used for that shortcut purpose). This control code may also be part of a multi-byte sequence, but if a sequence is active and the very control code is currently also an expected input, then the active sequence takes precedence and will consume the control code.

‘\c\’

([Option]ally context-dependent) Invokes the command ‘z+’.

‘\c]’

([Option]ally context-dependent) Invokes the command ‘z$’.

‘\c^’

([Option]ally context-dependent) Invokes the command ‘z0’.

‘\c_’

Cut the characters from the one after the cursor to the succeeding word boundary (mle-snarf-word-fwd).

‘\c?’

Backspace: mle-del-bwd.

–

Move the cursor forward one screen width (mle-go-screen-fwd).

–

Move the cursor backward one screen width (mle-go-screen-bwd).

–

[Option] Move the cursor home and clear the screen (mle-clear-screen).

–

mle-fullreset: different to mle-reset this will immediately reset a possibly active search etc.

–

mle-bell: ring the audible bell.

Coloured display

if terminal && [ "$features" =% +colour ] 
  colour iso view-msginfo ft=bold,fg=green 
  colour iso view-header ft=bold,fg=red from,subject 
  colour iso view-header fg=red 
 
  uncolour iso view-header from,subject 
  colour iso view-header ft=bold,fg=magenta,bg=cyan 
  colour 256 view-header ft=bold,fg=208,bg=230 "subject,from" 
  colour mono view-header ft=bold 
  colour mono view-header ft=bold,ft=reverse subject,from 
endif

Handling spam

• spamrate rates the given messages and sets their ‘is-spam’ flag accordingly. If the spam interface offers spam scores these can be shown in headline by using the format ‘%$’.
• spamham, spamspam and spamforget will interact with the Bayesian filter of the chosen interface and learn the given messages as “ham” or “spam”, respectively; the last command can be used to cause “unlearning” of messages; it adheres to their current ‘is-spam’ state and thus reverts previous teachings.
• spamclear and spamset will simply set and clear, respectively, the mentioned volatile ‘is-spam’ message flag, without any interface interaction.

$ spamd -i localhost:2142 -i /tmp/.spamsock -d [-L] [-l] 
$ spamd --listen=localhost:2142 --listen=/tmp/.spamsock \ 
    --daemonize [--local] [--allow-tell]

$ mail -Sspam-interface=spamc -Sspam-maxsize=500000 \ 
    -Sspamc-command=/usr/local/bin/spamc \ 
    -Sspamc-arguments="-U /tmp/.spamsock" -Sspamc-user= 
or 
$ mail -Sspam-interface=spamc -Sspam-maxsize=500000 \ 
    -Sspamc-command=/usr/local/bin/spamc \ 
    -Sspamc-arguments="-d localhost -p 2142" -Sspamc-user=

$ mail -Sspam-interface=filter -Sspam-maxsize=500000 \ 
    -Sspamfilter-ham="bogofilter -n" \ 
    -Sspamfilter-noham="bogofilter -N" \ 
    -Sspamfilter-nospam="bogofilter -S" \ 
    -Sspamfilter-rate="bogofilter -TTu 2>/dev/null" \ 
    -Sspamfilter-spam="bogofilter -s" \ 
    -Sspamfilter-rate-scanscore="1;^(.+)$"

define spamdelhook { 
  # Server side DCC 
  spamset (header x-dcc-brand-metrics "bulk") 
  # Server-side spamassassin(1) 
  spamset (header x-spam-flag "YES") 
  del :s # TODO we HAVE to be able to do `spamrate :u ! :sS' 
  move :S +maybe-spam 
  spamrate :u 
  del :s 
  move :S +maybe-spam 
} 
set folder-hook-SOMEFOLDER=spamdelhook

COMMANDS

? define __xv { 
  # Before v15: need to enable sh(1)ell-style on _entire_ line! 
  localopts yes;wysh set verbose;ignerr eval "${@}";return ${?} 
} 
? commandalias xv '\call __xv' 
? xv help set

Command modifiers

• The modifier reverse solidus \, to be placed first, prevents commandalias expansions on the remains of the line, e.g., ‘\echo’ will always evaluate the command echo, even if an (command)alias of the same name exists. commandalias content may itself contain further command modifiers, including an initial reverse solidus to prevent further expansions.
• The modifier ignerr indicates that any error generated by the following command should be ignored by the state machine and not cause a program exit with enabled errexit or for the standardized exit cases in posix mode. ?, one of the INTERNAL VARIABLES, will be set to the real exit status of the command regardless.
• local will alter the called command to apply changes only temporarily, local to block-scope, and can thus only be used inside of a defined macro or an account definition. Specifying it implies the modifier wysh. Block-scope settings will not be inherited by macros deeper in the call chain, and will be garbage collected once the current block is left. To record and unroll changes in the global scope use the command localopts.
• scope does yet not implement any functionality.
• u does yet not implement any functionality.
• Some commands support the vput modifier: if used, they expect the name of a variable, which can itself be a variable, i.e., shell expansion is applied, as their first argument, and will place their computation result in it instead of the default location (it is usually written to standard output).
  The given name will be tested for being a valid sh(1) variable name, and may therefore only consist of upper- and lowercase characters, digits, and the underscore; the hyphen-minus may be used as a non-portable extension; digits may not be used as first, hyphen-minus may not be used as last characters. In addition the name may either not be one of the known INTERNAL VARIABLES, or must otherwise refer to a writable (non-boolean) value variable. The actual put operation may fail nonetheless, e.g., if the variable expects a number argument only a number will be accepted. Any error during these operations causes the command as such to fail, and the error number ! will be set to ^ERR-NOTSUP, the exit status ? should be set to ‘-1’, but some commands deviate from the latter, which is documented.
• Last, but not least, the modifier wysh can be used for some old and established commands to choose the new Shell-style argument quoting rules over the traditional Old-style argument quoting.

Old-style argument quoting

• An argument can be enclosed between paired double-quotes ‘"argument"’ or single-quotes ‘'argument'’; any whitespace, shell word expansion, or reverse solidus characters (except as described next) within the quotes are treated literally as part of the argument. A double-quote will be treated literally within single-quotes and vice versa. Inside such a quoted string the actually used quote character can be used nonetheless by escaping it with a reverse solidus ‘\’, as in ‘"y\"ou"’.
• An argument that is not enclosed in quotes, as above, can usually still contain space characters if those spaces are reverse solidus escaped, as in ‘you\ are’.
• A reverse solidus outside of the enclosing quotes is discarded and the following character is treated literally as part of the argument.

Shell-style argument quoting

• The literal value of any character can be preserved by preceding it with the escape character reverse solidus ‘\’.
• Arguments which are enclosed in ‘'single-quotes'’ retain their literal value. A single-quote cannot occur within single-quotes.
• The literal value of all characters enclosed in ‘"double-quotes"’ is retained, with the exception of dollar sign ‘$’, which will cause variable expansion, as above, backquote (grave accent) ‘`’, (which not yet means anything special), reverse solidus ‘\’, which will escape any of the characters dollar sign ‘$’ (to prevent variable expansion), backquote (grave accent) ‘`’, double-quote ‘"’ (to prevent ending the quote) and reverse solidus ‘\’ (to prevent escaping, i.e., to embed a reverse solidus character as-is), but has no special meaning otherwise.
• Arguments enclosed in ‘$'dollar-single-quotes'’ extend normal single quotes in that reverse solidus escape sequences are expanded as follows:

  ‘\a’

  bell control character (ASCII and ISO-10646 BEL).

  ‘\b’

  backspace control character (ASCII and ISO-10646 BS).

  ‘\E’

  escape control character (ASCII and ISO-10646 ESC).

  ‘\e’

  the same.

  ‘\f’

  form feed control character (ASCII and ISO-10646 FF).

  ‘\n’

  line feed control character (ASCII and ISO-10646 LF).

  ‘\r’

  carriage return control character (ASCII and ISO-10646 CR).

  ‘\t’

  horizontal tabulator control character (ASCII and ISO-10646 HT).

  ‘\v’

  vertical tabulator control character (ASCII and ISO-10646 VT).

  ‘\\’

  emits a reverse solidus character.

  ‘\'’

  single quote.

  ‘\"’

  double quote (escaping is optional).

  ‘\NNN’

  eight-bit byte with the octal value ‘NNN’ (one to three octal digits), optionally prefixed by an additional ‘0’. A 0 byte will suppress further output for the quoted argument.

  ‘\xHH’

  eight-bit byte with the hexadecimal value ‘HH’ (one or two hexadecimal characters, no prefix, see vexpr). A 0 byte will suppress further output for the quoted argument.

  ‘\UHHHHHHHH’

  the Unicode / ISO-10646 character with the hexadecimal codepoint value ‘HHHHHHHH’ (one to eight hexadecimal characters) — note that Unicode defines the maximum codepoint ever to be supported as ‘0x10FFFF’ (in planes of ‘0xFFFF’ characters each). This escape is only supported in locales that support Unicode (see Character sets), in other cases the sequence will remain unexpanded unless the given code point is ASCII compatible or (if the [Option]al character set conversion is available) can be represented in the current locale. The character NUL will suppress further output for the quoted argument.

  ‘\uHHHH’

  Identical to ‘\UHHHHHHHH’ except it takes only one to four hexadecimal characters.

  ‘\cX’

  Emits the non-printable (ASCII and compatible) C0 control codes 0 (NUL) to 31 (US), and 127 (DEL). Printable representations of ASCII control codes can be created by mapping them to a different, visible part of the ASCII character set. Adding the number 64 achieves this for the codes 0 to 31, e.g., 7 (BEL): ‘7 + 64 = 71 = G’. The real operation is a bitwise logical XOR with 64 (bit 7 set, see vexpr), thus also covering code 127 (DEL), which is mapped to 63 (question mark): ‘? vexpr ^ 127 64’.

  Whereas historically circumflex notation has often been used for visualization purposes of control codes, e.g., ‘^G’, the reverse solidus notation has been standardized: ‘\cG’. Some control codes also have standardized (ISO-10646, ISO C) aliases, as shown above (e.g., ‘\a’, ‘\n’, ‘\t’): whenever such an alias exists it will be used for display purposes. The control code NUL (‘\c@’, a non-standard extension) will suppress further output for the remains of the token (which may extend beyond the current quote), or, depending on the context, the remains of all arguments for the current command.

  ‘\$NAME’

  Non-standard extension: expand the given variable name, as above. Brace enclosing the name is supported.

  ‘\`{command}’

  Not yet supported, just to raise awareness: Non-standard extension.

? echo 'Quotes '${HOME}' and 'tokens" differ!"# no comment 
? echo Quotes ${HOME} and tokens differ! # comment 
? echo Don"'"t you worry$'\x21' The sun shines on us. $'\u263A'

Message list arguments

Raw data arguments for codec commands

? vput shcodec res encode /usr/Schönes Wetter/heute.txt 
? echo $res 
$'/usr/Sch\u00F6nes Wetter/heute.txt' 
? shcodec d $res 
$'/usr/Sch\u00F6nes Wetter/heute.txt' 
? eval shcodec d $res 
/usr/Schönes Wetter/heute.txt

Filename transformations

• If the given name is a registered shortcut, it will be replaced with the expanded shortcut.
• The filename is matched against the following patterns or strings:

  #

  (Number sign) is expanded to the previous file.

  %

  (Percent sign) is replaced by the invoking user's primary system mailbox, which either is the (itself expandable) inbox if that is set, the standardized absolute pathname indicated by MAIL if that is set, or a built-in compile-time default otherwise.

  %user

  Expands to the primary system mailbox of user (and never the value of inbox, regardless of its actual setting).

  &

  (Ampersand) is replaced with the invoking user's secondary mailbox, the MBOX.

  +file

  Refers to a file in the folder directory (if that variable is set).

  %:filespec

  Expands to the same value as filespec, but has special meaning when used with, e.g., the command file: the file will be treated as a primary system mailbox by, e.g., the mbox and save commands, meaning that messages that have been read in the current session will be moved to the MBOX mailbox instead of simply being flagged as read.

• Meta expansions may be applied to the resulting filename, as allowed by the operation and applicable to the resulting access protocol (also see On URL syntax and credential lookup). For the file-protocol, a leading tilde ‘~’ character will be replaced by the expansion of HOME, except when followed by a valid user name, in which case the home directory of the given user is used instead.
  A shell expansion as if specified in double-quotes (see Shell-style argument quoting) may be applied, so that any occurrence of ‘$VARIABLE’ (or ‘${VARIABLE}’) will be replaced by the expansion of the variable, if possible; INTERNAL VARIABLES as well as ENVIRONMENT (shell) variables can be accessed through this mechanism.
  Shell pathname wildcard pattern expansions (glob(7)) may be applied as documented. If the fully expanded filename results in multiple pathnames and the command is expecting only one file, an error results.
  In interactive context, in order to allow simple value acceptance (via “ENTER”), arguments will usually be displayed in a properly quoted form, e.g., a file ‘diet\ is \curd.txt’ may be displayed as ‘'diet\ is \curd.txt'’.

Commands

!

Executes the SHELL command which follows, replacing unescaped exclamation marks with the previously executed command if the internal variable bang is set. This command supports vput as documented in Command modifiers, and manages the error number !. A 0 or positive exit status ? reflects the exit status of the command, negative ones that an error happened before the command was executed, or that the program did not exit cleanly, but, e.g., due to a signal: the error number is ^ERR-CHILD, then.

In conjunction with the vput modifier the following special cases exist: a negative exit status occurs if the collected data could not be stored in the given variable, which is a ^ERR-NOTSUP error that should otherwise not occur. ^ERR-CANCELED indicates that no temporary file could be created to collect the command output at first glance. In case of catchable out-of-memory situations ^ERR-NOMEM will occur and Mail will try to store the empty string, just like with all other detected error conditions.

#

The comment-command causes the entire line to be ignored. Note: this really is a normal command which' purpose is to discard its arguments, not a “comment-start” indicating special character, which means that, e.g., trailing comments on a line are not possible (except for commands which use Shell-style argument quoting).

+

Goes to the next message in sequence and types it (like “ENTER”).

-

Display the preceding message, or the n'th previous message if given a numeric argument n.

=

Shows the message number of the current message (the “dot”) when used without arguments, that of the given list otherwise. Output numbers will be separated from each other with the first character of ifs, and followed by the first character of if-ws, if that is not empty and not identical to the first. If that results in no separation at all a space character is used. This command supports vput (see Command modifiers), and manages the error number !.

?

[Option] Show a brief summary of commands. [Option] Given an argument a synopsis for the command in question is shown instead; commands can be abbreviated in general and this command can be used to see the full expansion of an abbreviation including the synopsis, try, e.g., ‘?h’, ‘?hel’ and ‘?help’ and see how the output changes. This mode also supports a more verbose output, which will provide the information documented for list.

|

A synonym for the pipe command.

account, unaccount

(ac, una) Creates, selects or lists (an) account(s). Accounts are special incarnations of defined macros and group commands and variable settings which together usually arrange the environment for the purpose of creating an email account. Different to normal macros settings which are covered by localopts – here by default enabled! – will not be reverted before the account is changed again. The special account ‘null’ (case-insensitive) always exists, and all but it can be deleted by the latter command, and in one operation with the special name ‘*’. Also for all but it a possibly set on-account-cleanup hook is called once they are left.

Without arguments a listing of all defined accounts is shown. With one argument the given account is activated: the system inbox of that account will be activated (as via file), a possibly installed folder-hook will be run, and the internal variable account will be updated. The two argument form is identical to defining a macro as via define:

account myisp { 
  set folder=~/mail inbox=+syste.mbox record=+sent.mbox 
  set from='(My Name) myname@myisp.example' 
  set mta=smtp://mylogin@smtp.myisp.example 
}
    

addrcodec

Perform email address codec transformations on raw-data argument, rather according to email standards (RFC 5322; [v15 behaviour may differ] will furtherly improve). Supports vput (see Command modifiers), and manages the error number !. The first argument must be either [+[+[+]]]e[ncode], d[ecode], s[kin] or skinl[ist] and specifies the operation to perform on the rest of the line.

Decoding will show how a standard-compliant MUA will display the given argument, which should be an email address. Please be aware that most MUAs have difficulties with the address standards, and vary wildly when (comments) in parenthesis, “double-quoted” strings, or quoted-pairs, as below, become involved. [v15 behaviour may differ] Mail currently does not perform decoding when displaying addresses.

Skinning is identical to decoding but only outputs the plain address, without any string, comment etc. components. Another difference is that it may fail with the error number ! set to ^ERR-INVAL if decoding fails to find a(n) (valid) email address, in which case the unmodified input will be output again.

skinlist first performs a skin operation, and thereafter checks a valid address for whether it is a registered mailing list (see mlist and mlsubscribe), eventually reporting that state in the error number ! as ^ERR-EXIST. (This state could later become overwritten by an I/O error, though.)

Encoding supports four different modes, lesser automated versions can be chosen by prefixing one, two or three plus signs: the standard imposes a special meaning on some characters, which thus have to be transformed to so-called quoted-pairs by pairing them with a reverse solidus ‘\’ in order to remove the special meaning; this might change interpretation of the entire argument from what has been desired, however! Specify one plus sign to remark that parenthesis shall be left alone, two for not turning double quotation marks into quoted-pairs, and three for also leaving any user-specified reverse solidus alone. The result will always be valid, if a successful exit status is reported ([v15 behaviour may differ] the current parser fails this assertion for some constructs). [v15 behaviour may differ] Addresses need to be specified in between angle brackets ‘<’, ‘>’ if the construct becomes more difficult, otherwise the current parser will fail; it is not smart enough to guess right.

? addrc enc "Hey, you",<diet@exam.ple>\ out\ there 
"\"Hey, you\", \\ out\\ there" <diet@exam.ple> 
? addrc d "\"Hey, you\", \\ out\\ there" <diet@exam.ple> 
"Hey, you", \ out\ there <diet@exam.ple> 
? addrc s "\"Hey, you\", \\ out\\ there" <diet@exam.ple> 
diet@exam.ple
    

alias, unalias

(a, una) Aliases are a method of creating personal distribution lists that map a single alias name to none to multiple real receivers; these aliases become expanded after message composing is completed. The latter command removes the given list of aliases, the special name ‘*’ will discard all existing aliases.

The former command shows all currently defined aliases when used without arguments, and with one argument the expansion of the given alias. With more than one argument, creates or appends to the alias name given as the first argument the remaining arguments. Alias names adhere to the Postfix MTA aliases(5) rules and are thus restricted to alphabetic characters, digits, the underscore, hyphen-minus, the number sign, colon and commercial at, a dollar sign is allowed but in the first position; As extensions the exclamation mark ‘!’, period ‘.’ as well as “any haracter that has the high bit set” may be used: ‘[[:alnum:]_#:@-][[:alnum:]_#:@$;.-]*’.

[v15 behaviour may differ] Unfortunately the colon is currently not supported, as it interferes with normal address parsing rules. [v15 behaviour may differ] Such high bit characters will likely cause warnings at the moment for the same reasons why colon is unsupported; also, in the future locale dependent character set validity checks will be performed.

alternates, unalternates

[Only new quoting rules] (alt) Manage a list of alternate addresses or names of the active user, members of which will be removed from recipient lists (except one). There is a set of implicit alternates which is formed of the values of LOGNAME, from, sender and reply-to. from will not be used if sender is set. The latter command removes the given list of alternates, the special name ‘*’ will discard all existing alternate names.

The former command manages the error number !. It shows the current set of alternates when used without arguments; in this mode only it also supports vput (see Command modifiers). Otherwise the given arguments (after being checked for validity) are appended to the list of alternate names; in posix mode they replace that list instead.

answered, unanswered

Take a message lists and mark each message as (not) having been answered. Messages will be marked answered when being replyd to automatically if the markanswered variable is set. See the section Message states.

bind, unbind

[Option][Only new quoting rules] The bind command extends the MLE (see On terminal control and line editor) with freely configurable key bindings. The latter command removes from the given context the given key binding, both of which may be specified as a wildcard ‘*’, so that, e.g., ‘unbind * *’ will remove all bindings of all contexts. Due to initialization order unbinding will not work for built-in key bindings upon program startup, however: please use line-editor-no-defaults for this purpose instead.

With one argument the former command shows all key bindings for the given context, specifying an asterisk ‘*’ will show the bindings of all contexts; a more verbose listing will be produced if either of debug or verbose are set. With two or more arguments a binding is (re)established: the first argument is the context to which the binding shall apply, the second argument is a comma-separated list of the “keys” which form the binding, and any remaining arguments form the expansion. To indicate that a binding shall not be auto-committed, but that the expansion shall instead be furtherly editable by the user, a commercial at ‘@’ (that will be removed) can be placed last in the expansion, from which leading and trailing whitespace will finally be removed. Reverse solidus cannot be used as the last character of expansion.

Contexts define when a binding applies, i.e., a binding will not be seen unless the context for which it is defined for is currently active. This is not true for the shared binding ‘base’, which is the foundation for all other bindings and as such always applies, its bindings, however, only apply secondarily. The available contexts are the shared ‘base’, the ‘default’ context which is used in all not otherwise documented situations, and ‘compose’, which applies to compose mode only.

“Keys” which form the binding are specified as a comma-separated list of byte-sequences, where each list entry corresponds to one key(press). A list entry may, indicated by a leading colon character ‘:’, also refer to the name of a terminal capability; several dozen names will be compiled in and may be specified either by their terminfo(5), or, if existing, by their termcap(5) name, regardless of the actually used [Option]al terminal control library. It is possible to use any capability, as long as the name is resolvable by the [Option]al control library or was defined via the internal variable termcap. Input sequences are not case-normalized, so that an exact match is required to update or remove a binding. Examples:

? bind base $'\E',d mle-snarf-word-fwd # Esc(ape) 
? bind base $'\E',$'\c?' mle-snarf-word-bwd # Esc,Delete 
? bind default $'\cA',:khome,w 'echo Editable binding@' 
? bind default a,b,c rm -irf / @  # Also editable 
? bind default :kf1 File % 
? bind compose :kf1 ~v
    

Note that the entire comma-separated list is first parsed (over) as a shell-token with whitespace as the field separator, before being parsed and expanded for real with comma as the field separator, therefore whitespace needs to be properly quoted, see Shell-style argument quoting. Using Unicode reverse solidus escape sequences renders a binding defunctional if the locale does not support Unicode (see Character sets), and using terminal capabilities does so if no (corresponding) terminal control support is (currently) available.

The following terminal capability names are built-in and can be used in terminfo(5) or (if available) the two-letter termcap(5) notation. See the respective manual for a list of capabilities. The program infocmp(1) can be used to show all the capabilities of TERM or the given terminal type; using the -x flag will also show supported (non-standard) extensions.

kbs or kb

Backspace.

kdch1 or kD

Delete character.

kDC or *4

— shifted variant.

kel or kE

Clear to end of line.

kext or @9

Exit.

kich1 or kI

Insert character.

kIC or #3

— shifted variant.

khome or kh

Home.

kHOM or #2

— shifted variant.

kend or @7

End.

knp or kN

Next page.

kpp or kP

Previous page.

kcub1 or kl

Left cursor (with more modifiers: see below).

kLFT or #4

— shifted variant.

kcuf1 or kr

Right cursor (ditto).

kRIT or %i

— shifted variant.

kcud1 or kd

Down cursor (ditto).

kDN

— shifted variant (only terminfo).

kcuu1 or ku

Up cursor (ditto).

kUP

— shifted variant (only terminfo).

kf0 or k0

Function key 0. Add one for each function key up to kf9 and k9, respectively.

kf10 or k;

Function key 10.

kf11 or F1

Function key 11. Add one for each function key up to kf19 and F9, respectively.

Some terminals support key-modifier combination extensions, e.g., ‘Alt+Shift+xy’. For example, the delete key, kdch1: in its shifted variant, the name is mutated to kDC, then a number is appended for the states ‘Alt’ (kDC3), ‘Shift+Alt’ (kDC4), ‘Control’ (kDC5), ‘Shift+Control’ (kDC6), ‘Alt+Control’ (kDC7), finally ‘Shift+Alt+Control’ (kDC8). The same for the left cursor key, kcub1: KLFT, KLFT3, KLFT4, KLFT5, KLFT6, KLFT7, KLFT8.

It is advisable to use an initial escape or other control character (e.g., ‘\cA’) for bindings which describe user key combinations (as opposed to purely terminal capability based ones), in order to avoid ambiguities whether input belongs to key sequences or not; it also reduces search time. Adjusting bind-timeout may help shall keys and sequences be falsely recognized.

call

[Only new quoting rules] Calls the given macro, which must have been created via define (see there for more), otherwise an ^ERR-NOENT error occurs. Calling macros recursively will at some time excess the stack size limit, causing a hard program abortion; if recursively calling a macro is the last command of the current macro, consider to use the command xcall, which will first release all resources of the current macro before replacing the current macro with the called one.

call_if

Identical to call if the given macro has been created via define, but does not fail nor warn if the macro does not exist.

cd

(ch) Change the working directory to HOME or the given argument. Synonym for chdir.

certsave

[Option] Only applicable to S/MIME signed messages. Takes an optional message list and a filename and saves the certificates contained within the message signatures to the named file in both human-readable and PEM format. The certificates can later be used to send encrypted messages to the respective message senders by setting smime-encrypt-USER@HOST variables.

charsetalias, uncharsetalias

[Only new quoting rules] Manage alias mappings for (conversion of) Character sets. Mappings are ineffective if character set conversion is not available (features does not announce ‘+iconv’). Expansion happens recursively, but expansion is not performed for INTERNAL VARIABLES, e.g., charset-8bit.

The latter command deletes all aliases given as arguments, all aliases can be deleted at once with the special argument ‘*’. The former shows the list of all currently defined aliases if used without arguments, the expansion of the given alias with one argument. Otherwise all given arguments are treated as pairs of character sets and their desired target alias name, creating new or changing already existing aliases, as necessary.

chdir

(ch) Change the working directory to HOME or the given argument. Synonym for cd.

collapse, uncollapse

Only applicable to ‘thread’ed sort mode. Takes a message list and makes all replies to these messages invisible in header summaries, except for ‘new’ messages and the “dot”. Also when a message with collapsed replies is displayed, all of these are automatically uncollapsed. The latter command undoes collapsing.

colour, uncolour

[Option][Only new quoting rules] Manage colour mappings of and for a Coloured display. The type of colour is given as the (case-insensitive) first argument, which must be one of ‘256’ for 256-colour terminals, ‘8’, ‘ansi’ or ‘iso’ for the standard 8-colour ANSI / ISO 6429 colour palette and ‘1’ or ‘mono’ for monochrome terminals. Monochrome terminals cannot deal with colours, but only (some) font attributes.

Without further arguments the list of all currently defined mappings for the given colour type is shown (as a special case giving ‘all’ or ‘*’ will show the mappings of all types). Otherwise the second argument defines the mappable slot, and the third argument a (comma-separated list of) colour and font attribute specification(s), and the optional fourth argument can be used to specify a precondition: if conditioned mappings exist they are tested in (creation) order unless a (case-insensitive) match has been found, and the default mapping (if any has been established) will only be chosen as a last resort. The types of precondition available depend on the mappable slot (see Coloured display for some examples), the following of which exist:

Mappings prefixed with ‘mle-’ are used for the [Option]al built-in Mailx-Line-Editor (MLE, see On terminal control and line editor) and do not support preconditions.

mle-position

This mapping is used for the position indicator that is visible when a line cannot be fully displayed on the screen.

mle-prompt

Used for the prompt.

Mappings prefixed with ‘sum-’ are used in header summaries, and they all understand the preconditions ‘dot’ (the current message) and ‘older’ for elder messages (only honoured in conjunction with datefield-markout-older).

sum-dotmark

This mapping is used for the “dotmark” that can be created with the ‘%>’ or ‘%<’ formats of the variable headline.

sum-header

For the complete header summary line except the “dotmark” and the thread structure.

sum-thread

For the thread structure which can be created with the ‘%i’ format of the variable headline.

Mappings prefixed with ‘view-’ are used when displaying messages.

view-from_

This mapping is used for so-called ‘From_’ lines, which are MBOX file format specific header lines.

view-header

For header lines. A comma-separated list of headers to which the mapping applies may be given as a precondition; if the [Option]al regular expression support is available then if any of the “magical” (extended) regular expression characters is seen the precondition will be evaluated as (an extended) one.

view-msginfo

For the introductional message info line.

view-partinfo

For MIME part info lines.

The following (case-insensitive) colour definitions and font attributes are understood, multiple of which can be specified in a comma-separated list:

ft=

a font attribute: ‘bold’, ‘reverse’ or ‘underline’. It is possible (and often applicable) to specify multiple font attributes for a single mapping.

fg=

foreground colour attribute: ‘black’, ‘blue’, ‘green’, ‘red’, ‘brown’, ‘magenta’, ‘cyan’ or ‘white’. To specify a 256-colour mode a decimal number colour specification in the range 0 to 255, inclusive, is supported, and interpreted as follows:

0 - 7

the standard ISO 6429 colours, as above.

8 - 15

high intensity variants of the standard colours.

16 - 231

216 colours in tuples of 6.

232 - 255

grayscale from black to white in 24 steps.

#!/bin/sh - 
fg() { printf "\033[38;5;${1}m($1)"; } 
bg() { printf "\033[48;5;${1}m($1)"; } 
i=0 
while [ $i -lt 256 ]; do fg $i; i=$(($i + 1)); done 
printf "\033[0m\n" 
i=0 
while [ $i -lt 256 ]; do bg $i; i=$(($i + 1)); done 
printf "\033[0m\n"
        

bg=

background colour attribute (see fg= for possible values).

The command uncolour will remove for the given colour type (the special type ‘*’ selects all) the given mapping; if the optional precondition argument is given only the exact tuple of mapping and precondition is removed. The special name ‘*’ will remove all mappings (no precondition allowed), thus ‘uncolour * *’ will remove all established mappings.

commandalias, uncommandalias

[Only new quoting rules] Define or list, and remove, respectively, command aliases. An (command)alias can be used everywhere a normal command can be used, but always takes precedence: any arguments that are given to the command alias are joined onto the alias expansion, and the resulting string forms the command line that is, in effect, executed. The latter command removes all given aliases, the special name ‘*’ will remove all existing aliases. When used without arguments the former shows a list of all currently known aliases, with one argument only the expansion of the given one.

With two or more arguments a command alias is defined or updated: the first argument is the name under which the remaining command line should be accessible, the content of which can be just about anything. An alias may itself expand to another alias, but to avoid expansion loops further expansion will be prevented if an alias refers to itself or if an expansion depth limit is reached. Explicit expansion prevention is available via reverse solidus \, one of the Command modifiers.

? commandalias xx 
mail: `commandalias': no such alias: xx 
? commandalias xx echo hello, 
? commandalias xx 
commandalias xx 'echo hello,' 
? xx 
hello, 
? xx world 
hello, world
    

Copy

(C) Copy messages to files whose names are derived from the author of the respective message and do not mark them as being saved; otherwise identical to Save.

copy

(c) Copy messages to the named file and do not mark them as being saved; otherwise identical to save.

cwd

Show the name of the current working directory, as reported by getcwd(3). Supports vput (see Command modifiers). The return status is tracked via ?.

Decrypt

[Option] For unencrypted messages this command is identical to Copy; Encrypted messages are first decrypted, if possible, and then copied.

decrypt

[Option] For unencrypted messages this command is identical to copy; Encrypted messages are first decrypted, if possible, and then copied.

define, undefine

The latter command deletes the given macro, the special name ‘*’ will discard all existing macros. Deletion of (a) macro(s) can be performed from within running (a) macro(s), including self-deletion. Without arguments the former command prints the current list of macros, including their content, otherwise it defines a macro, replacing an existing one of the same name as applicable.

A defined macro can be invoked explicitly by using the call, call_if and xcall commands, or implicitly if a macro hook is triggered, e.g., a folder-hook. Execution of a macro body can be stopped from within by calling return.

Temporary macro block-scope variables can be created or deleted with the local command modifier in conjunction with the commands set and unset, respectively. To enforce unrolling of changes made to (global) INTERNAL VARIABLES the command localopts can be used instead; its covered scope depends on how (i.e., “as what”: normal macro, folder hook, hook, account switch) the macro is invoked.

Inside a called macro, the given positional parameters are implicitly local to the macro's scope, and may be accessed via the variables *, @, # and 1 and any other positive unsigned decimal number less than or equal to #. Positional parameters can be shifted, or become completely replaced, removed etc. via vpospar. A helpful command to perform many sorts of number and string evaluations is vexpr.

define name { 
  command1 
  command2 
  ... 
  commandN 
} 
 
# E.g. 
define exmac { 
  echo Parameter 1 of ${#} is ${1}, all: ${*} / ${@} 
  return 1000 0 
} 
call exmac Hello macro exmac! 
echo ${?}/${!}/${^ERRNAME}
    

delete, undelete

(d, u) Marks the given message list as being or not being ‘deleted’, respectively; if no argument has been specified then the usual search for a visible message is performed, as documented for Message list arguments, showing only the next input prompt if the search fails. Deleted messages will neither be saved in the secondary mailbox MBOX nor will they be available for most other commands. If the autoprint variable is set, the new “dot” or the last message restored, respectively, is automatically typed; also see dp, dt.

digmsg

[Only new quoting rules] Digging (information out of) messages is possible through digmsg objects, which can be created for the given message number; in compose mode the hyphen-minus ‘-’ will instead open the message that is being composed. If a hyphen-minus is given as the optional third argument then output will be generated on the standard output channel instead of being subject to consumation by the read or readall commands.

The objects may be removed again by giving the same identifier used for creation; this step could be omitted: objects will be automatically closed when the active mailbox or the compose mode is left, respectively. In all other cases the second argument is an object identifier, and the third and all following arguments are interpreted as via ~^ (see COMMAND ESCAPES):

? vput = msgno; digmsg create $msgno 
? digmsg $msgno header list;   readall x;   echon $x 
210 Subject From To Message-ID References In-Reply-To Status 
? digmsg $msgno header show Status;readall x;echon $x 
212 Status 
RO 
 
? digmsg remove $msgno
    

discard

(di) Identical to ignore. Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

dp, dt

Delete the given messages and automatically type the new “dot” if one exists, regardless of the setting of autoprint.

dotmove

Move the “dot” up or down by one message when given ‘+’ or ‘-’ argument, respectively.

draft, undraft

Take message lists and mark each given message as being draft, or not being draft, respectively, as documented in the section Message states.

echo

[Only new quoting rules] (ec) Echoes arguments to standard output and writes a trailing newline, whereas the otherwise identical echon does not. Shell-style argument quoting is used, Filename transformations are applied to the expanded arguments. This command also supports vput as documented in Command modifiers, and manages the error number !: if data is stored in a variable then the return value reflects the length of the result string in case of success and is ‘-1’ on error.

echoerr

[Only new quoting rules] Identical to echo except that is echoes to standard error. Also see echoerrn. In interactive sessions the [Option]al message ring queue for errors will be used instead, if available and vput was not used.

echon

[Only new quoting rules] Identical to echo, but does not write or store a trailing newline.

echoerrn

[Only new quoting rules] Identical to echoerr, but does not write or store a trailing newline.

edit

(e) Point the text EDITOR at each message from the given list in turn. Modified contents are discarded unless the writebackedited variable is set, and are not used unless the mailbox can be written to and the editor returns a successful exit status. visual can be used instead for a more display oriented editor.

elif

Part of the if (see there for more), elif, else, endif conditional — if the condition of a preceding if was false, check the following condition and execute the following block if it evaluates true.

else

(el) Part of the if (see there for more), elif, else, endif conditional — if none of the conditions of the preceding if and elif commands was true, the else block is executed.

endif

(en) Marks the end of an if (see there for more), elif, else, endif conditional execution block.

environ

[Only new quoting rules] Mail has a strict notion about which variables are INTERNAL VARIABLES and which are managed in the program ENVIRONMENT. Since some of the latter are a vivid part of Mails functioning, however, they are transparently integrated into the normal handling of internal variables via set and unset. To integrate other environment variables of choice into this transparent handling, and also to export internal variables into the process environment where they normally are not, a ‘link’ needs to become established with this command, as in, e.g.,

environ link PERL5LIB TZ

Afterwards changing such variables with set will cause automatic updates of the program environment, and therefore be inherited by newly created child processes. Sufficient system support provided (it was in BSD as early as 1987, and is standardized since Y2K) removing such variables with unset will remove them also from the program environment, but in any way the knowledge they ever have been ‘link’ed will be lost. Note that this implies that localopts may cause loss of such links.

The command ‘unlink’ will remove an existing link, but leaves the variables as such intact. Additionally the subcommands ‘set’ and ‘unset’ are provided, which work exactly the same as the documented commands set and unset, but (additionally un)link the variable(s) with the program environment and thus immediately export them to, or remove them from (if possible), respectively, the program environment.

errors

[Option] Since Mail uses the console as a user interface it can happen that messages scroll by too fast to become recognized. An error message ring queue is available which stores duplicates of any error message and notifies the user in interactive sessions whenever a new error has occurred. The queue is finite: if its maximum size is reached any new message replaces the eldest. The command errors can be used to manage this message queue: if given show or no argument the queue will be displayed and cleared, clear will only clear all messages from the queue.

eval

[Only new quoting rules] Construct a command by concatenating the arguments, separated with a single space character, and then evaluate the result. This command passes through the exit status ? and error number ! of the evaluated command; also see call.

define xxx { 
  echo "xxx arg <$1>" 
  shift 
  if [ $# -gt 0 ] 
    \xcall xxx "$@" 
  endif 
} 
define yyy { 
  eval "$@ ' ball" 
} 
call yyy '\call xxx' "b\$'\t'u ' " 
call xxx arg <b      u> 
call xxx arg <  > 
call xxx arg <ball>
    

exit

(ex or x) Exit from Mail without changing the active mailbox and skip any saving of messages in the secondary mailbox MBOX, as well as a possibly tracked line editor history-file. The optional status number argument will be passed through to exit(3). [v15 behaviour may differ] For now it can happen that the given status will be overwritten, later this will only occur if a later error needs to be reported onto an otherwise success indicating status.

File

(Fi) Like file, but open the mailbox read-only.

file

(fi) The file command switches to a new mailbox. Without arguments it shows status information of the current mailbox. If an argument is given, it will write out changes (such as deletions) the user has made, open a new mailbox, update the internal variables mailbox-resolved and mailbox-display, execute an according folder-hook, if one is installed, and optionally display a summary of headers if the variable header is set.

Filename transformations will be applied to the name argument, and ‘protocol://’ prefixes are, i.e., URL syntax is understood, e.g., ‘mbox:///tmp/mdirbox’: if a protocol prefix is used the mailbox type is fixated and neither the auto-detection (read on) nor the newfolders mechanisms apply. [Option]ally URLs can also be used to access network resources, which may be accessed securely via Encrypted network communication if so supported, and it is possible to proxy all network traffic over a SOCKS5 server given via socks-proxy.

[v15-compat] protocol://[user[:password]@]host[:port][/path]

[no v15-compat] protocol://[user@]host[:port][/path]

[Option]ally supported network protocols are pop3 (POP3) and pop3s (POP3 with TLS encrypted transport), imap and imaps. The [/path] part is valid only for IMAP; there it defaults to INBOX. Network URLs require a special encoding as documented in the section On URL syntax and credential lookup.

If the resulting file protocol (MBOX database) name is located on a local filesystem then the list of all registered filetypes is traversed in order to see whether a transparent intermediate conversion step is necessary to handle the given mailbox, in which case Mail will use the found hook to load and save data into and from a temporary file, respectively. Changing hooks will not affect already opened mailboxes. For example, the following creates hooks for the gzip(1) compression tool and a combined compressed and encrypted format:

? filetype \ 
    gzip 'gzip -dc' 'gzip -c' \ 
    zst.pgp 'gpg -d | zstd -dc' 'zstd -19 -zc | gpg -e'
    

MBOX databases will always be protected via file-region locks (fcntl(2)) during file operations in order to avoid inconsistencies due to concurrent modifications. [Option] In addition mailbox files treated as the system inbox (MAIL), as well as primary system mailboxes in general will also be protected by so-called dotlock files, the traditional way of mail spool file locking: for any file ‘x’ a lock file ‘x.lock’ will be created for the duration of the synchronization — as necessary an external privileged dotlock helper will be used to create the dotlock file in the same directory and with the same user and group identities as the file of interest. dotlock-disable can be used to turn off additional dotlock files, shall the need arise.

Mail by default uses tolerant POSIX rules when reading MBOX database files, but it will detect invalid message boundaries in this mode and complain (even more with debug) if any is seen: in this case mbox-rfc4155 can be used to create a valid MBOX database from the invalid input.

[Option] If no protocol has been fixated, and name refers to a directory with the subdirectories ‘tmp’, ‘new’ and ‘cur’, then it is treated as a folder in “Maildir” format. The maildir format stores each message in its own file, and has been designed so that file locking is not necessary when reading or writing files.

[v15 behaviour may differ] If no protocol has been fixated and no existing file has been found, the variable newfolders controls the format of mailboxes yet to be created.

filetype, unfiletype

[Only new quoting rules] Define or list, and remove, respectively, file handler hooks, which provide (shell) commands that enable Mail to load and save MBOX files from and to files with the registered file extensions; it will use an intermediate temporary file to store the plain data. The latter command removes the hooks for all given extensions, ‘*’ will remove all existing handlers.

When used without arguments the former shows a list of all currently defined file hooks, with one argument the expansion of the given alias. Otherwise three arguments are expected, the first specifying the file extension for which the hook is meant, and the second and third defining the load- and save commands, respectively, to deal with the file type, both of which must read from standard input and write to standard output. Changing hooks will not affect already opened mailboxes ([v15 behaviour may differ] except below). [v15 behaviour may differ] For now too much work is done, and files are oftened read in twice where once would be sufficient: this can cause problems if a filetype is changed while such a file is opened; this was already so with the built-in support of .gz etc. in Heirloom, and will vanish in v15. [v15 behaviour may differ] For now all handler strings are passed to the SHELL for evaluation purposes; in the future a ‘!’ prefix to load and save commands may mean to bypass this shell instance: placing a leading space will avoid any possible misinterpretations.

? filetype bz2 'bzip2 -dc' 'bzip2 -zc' \ 
    gz 'gzip -dc' 'gzip -c'  xz 'xz -dc' 'xz -zc' \ 
    zst 'zstd -dc' 'zstd -19 -zc' \ 
    zst.pgp 'gpg -d | zstd -dc' 'zstd -19 -zc | gpg -e' 
? set record=+sent.zst.pgp
    

flag, unflag

Take message lists and mark the messages as being flagged, or not being flagged, respectively, for urgent/special attention. See the section Message states.

folder

(fold) The same as file.

folders

With no arguments, list the names of the folders in the folder directory. With an existing folder as an argument, lists the names of folders below the named folder.

Followup

(F) Similar to Respond, but saves the message in a file named after the local part of the first recipient's address (instead of in record).

followup

(fo) Similar to respond, but saves the message in a file named after the local part of the first recipient's address (instead of in record).

followupall

Similar to followup, but responds to all recipients regardless of the flipr variable.

followupsender

Similar to Followup, but responds to the sender only regardless of the flipr variable.

Forward

Similar to forward, but saves the message in a file named after the local part of the recipient's address (instead of in record).

forward

Takes a message and the address of a recipient and forwards the message to him. The text of the original message is included in the new one, with the value of the forward-inject-head variable preceding, and the value of forward-inject-tail succeeding it. To filter the included header fields to the desired subset use the ‘forward’ slot of the white- and blacklisting command headerpick. Only the first part of a multipart message is included unless forward-as-attachment, and recipient addresses will be stripped from comments, names etc. unless the internal variable fullnames is set.

This may generate the errors ^ERR-DESTADDRREQ if no receiver has been specified, ^ERR-PERM if some addressees where rejected by expandaddr, ^ERR-NODATA if no applicable messages have been given, ^ERR-NOTSUP if multiple messages have been specified, ^ERR-IO if an I/O error occurs, ^ERR-NOTSUP if a necessary character set conversion fails, and ^ERR-INVAL for other errors.

from

(f) Takes a list of message specifications and displays a summary of their message headers, exactly as via headers, making the first message of the result the new “dot” (the last message if showlast is set). An alias of this command is search. Also see Specifying messages.

Fwd

[Obsolete] Alias for Forward.

fwd

[Obsolete] Alias for forward.

fwdignore

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

fwdretain

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

ghost, unghost

[Obsolete] Replaced by commandalias, uncommandalias.

headerpick, unheaderpick

[Only new quoting rules] Multiplexer command to manage white- and blacklisting selections of header fields for a variety of applications. Without arguments the set of contexts that have settings is displayed. When given arguments, the first argument is the context to which the command applies, one of (case-insensitive) ‘type’ for display purposes (via, e.g., type), ‘save’ for selecting which headers shall be stored persistently when save, copy, move or even decrypting messages (note that MIME related etc. header fields should not be ignored in order to not destroy usability of the message in this case), ‘forward’ for stripping down messages when forwarding message (has no effect if forward-as-attachment is set), and ‘top’ for defining user-defined set of fields for the command top.

The current settings of the given context are displayed if it is the only argument. A second argument denotes the type of restriction that is to be chosen, it may be (a case-insensitive prefix of) ‘retain’ or ‘ignore’ for white- and blacklisting purposes, respectively. Establishing a whitelist suppresses inspection of the corresponding blacklist.

If no further argument is given the current settings of the given type will be displayed, otherwise the remaining arguments specify header fields, which [Option]ally may be given as regular expressions, to be added to the given type. The special wildcard field (asterisk, ‘*’) will establish a (fast) shorthand setting which covers all fields.

The latter command always takes three or more arguments and can be used to remove selections, i.e., from the given context, the given type of list, all the given headers will be removed, the special argument ‘*’ will remove all headers.

headers

(h) Show the current group of headers, the size of which depends on the variable screen in interactive mode, and the format of which can be defined with headline. If a message-specification is given the group of headers containing the first message therein is shown and the message at the top of the screen becomes the new “dot”; the last message is targeted if showlast is set.

help

(hel) A synonym for ?.

history

[Option] Without arguments or when given show all history entries are shown (this mode also supports a more verbose output). load will replace the list of entries with the content of history-file, and save will dump the current list to said file, replacing former content. clear will delete all history entries. The argument can also be a signed decimal NUMBER, which will select and evaluate the respective history entry, and move it to the top of the history; a negative number is used as an offset to the current command, e.g., ‘-1’ will select the last command, the history top. Please see On terminal control and line editor for more on this topic.

hold

(ho, also preserve) Takes a message list and marks each message therein to be saved in the user's system inbox instead of in the secondary mailbox MBOX. Does not override the delete command. Mail deviates from the POSIX standard with this command, because a next command issued after hold will display the following message, not the current one.

if

(i) Part of the if, elif, else, endif conditional execution construct — if the given condition is true then the encapsulated block is executed. The POSIX standard only supports the (case-insensitive) conditions ‘r’eceive and ‘s’end, the remaining are non-portable extensions. [v15 behaviour may differ] These commands do not yet use Shell-style argument quoting and therefore do not know about input tokens, so that syntax elements have to be surrounded by whitespace; in v15 Mail will inspect all conditions bracket group wise and consider the tokens, representing values and operators, therein, which also means that variables will already have been expanded at that time (just like in the shell).

if receive 
  commands ... 
else 
  commands ... 
endif
    

The (case-insensitive) condition ‘t’erminal will evaluate to true if the standard input is a terminal, i.e., in interactive sessions. Another condition can be any boolean value (see the section INTERNAL VARIABLES for textual boolean representations) to mark an enwrapped block as “never execute” or “always execute”. (It shall be remarked that a faulty condition skips all branches until endif.)

([v15 behaviour may differ] In v15 Shell-style argument quoting will be used, and this command will simply interpret expanded tokens.) It is possible to check INTERNAL VARIABLES as well as ENVIRONMENT variables for existence or compare their expansion against a user given value or another variable by using the ‘$’ (“variable next”) conditional trigger character; a variable on the right hand side may be signalled using the same mechanism. Variable names may be enclosed in a pair of matching braces. When this mode has been triggered, several operators are available:

Integer operators treat the arguments on the left and right hand side of the operator as integral numbers and compare them arithmetically. It is an error if any of the operands is not a valid integer, an empty argument (which implies it had been quoted) is treated as if it were 0. Available operators are ‘-lt’ (less than), ‘-le’ (less than or equal to), ‘-eq’ (equal), ‘-ne’ (not equal), ‘-ge’ (greater than or equal to), and ‘-gt’ (greater than).

String data operators compare the left and right hand side according to their textual content. Unset variables are treated as the empty string. The behaviour of string operators can be adjusted by prefixing the operator with the modifier trigger commercial at ‘@’, followed by none to multiple modifiers: for now supported is ‘i’, which turns the comparison into a case-insensitive one: this is implied if no modifier follows the trigger.

Available string operators are ‘<’ (less than), ‘<=’ (less than or equal to), ‘==’ (equal), ‘!=’ (not equal), ‘>=’ (greater than or equal to), ‘>’ (greater than), ‘=%’ (is substring of) and ‘!%’ (is not substring of). By default these operators work on bytes and (therefore) do not take into account character set specifics. If the case-insensitivity modifier has been used, case is ignored according to the rules of the US-ASCII encoding, i.e., bytes are still compared.

When the [Option]al regular expression support is available, the additional string operators ‘=~’ and ‘!~’ can be used. They treat the right hand side as an extended regular expression that is matched according to the active locale (see Character sets), i.e., character sets should be honoured correctly.

Conditions can be joined via AND-OR lists (where the AND operator is ‘&&’ and the OR operator is ‘||’), which have equal precedence and will be evaluated with left associativity, thus using the same syntax that is known for the sh(1). It is also possible to form groups of conditions and lists by enclosing them in pairs of brackets ‘[ ... ]’, which may be interlocked within each other, and also be joined via AND-OR lists.

The results of individual conditions and entire groups may be modified via unary operators: the unary operator ‘!’ will reverse the result.

# (This not in v15, there [ -n "$debug"]!) 
if $debug 
  echo *debug* is set 
endif 
if [ "$ttycharset" == UTF-8 ] || \ 
    [ "$ttycharset" @i== UTF8 ] 
  echo *ttycharset* is UTF-8, the former case-sensitive! 
endif 
set t1=one t2=one 
if [ "${t1}" == "${t2}" ] 
  echo These two variables are equal 
endif 
if [ "$features" =% +regex ] && \ 
    [ "$TERM" @i=~ "^xterm.*" ] 
  echo ..in an X terminal 
endif 
if [ [ true ] && [ [ "${debug}" != '' ] || \ 
    [ "$verbose" != '' ] ] ] 
  echo Noisy, noisy 
endif 
if true && [ "$debug" != '' ] || [ "${verbose}" != '' ] 
  echo Left associativity, as is known from the shell 
endif
    

ignore

(ig) Identical to discard. Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

list

Shows the names of all available commands, alphabetically sorted. If given any non-whitespace argument the list will be shown in the order in which command prefixes are searched. [Option] In conjunction with a set variable verbose additional information will be provided for each command: the argument type will be indicated, the documentation string will be shown, and the set of command flags will show up:

‘`local'’

command supports the command modifier local.

‘`vput'’

command supports the command modifier vput.

‘*!*’

the error number is tracked in !.

‘needs-box’

whether the command needs an active mailbox, a file.

‘ok:’

indicators whether command is ...

‘batch/interactive’

usable in interactive or batch mode (-#).

‘send-mode’

usable in send mode.

‘subprocess’

allowed to be used when running in a subprocess instance, e.g., from within a macro that is called via on-compose-splice.

‘not ok:’

indicators whether command is not ...

‘compose-mode’

available in compose mode.

‘startup’

available during program startup, e.g., in Resource files.

‘gabby’

The command produces history-gabby history entries.

localopts

This command can be used to localize changes to (linked) ENVIRONMENT as well as (global) INTERNAL VARIABLES, meaning that their state will be reverted to the former one once the “covered scope” is left. Just like the command modifier local, which provides block-scope localization for some commands (instead), it can only be used inside of macro definition blocks introduced by account or define. The covered scope of an account is left once a different account is activated, and some macros, notably folder-hooks, use their own specific notion of covered scope, here it will be extended until the folder is left again.

This setting stacks up: i.e., if ‘macro1’ enables change localization and calls ‘macro2’, which explicitly resets localization, then any value changes within ‘macro2’ will still be reverted when the scope of ‘macro1’ is left. (Caveats: if in this example ‘macro2’ changes to a different account which sets some variables that are already covered by localizations, their scope will be extended, and in fact leaving the account will (thus) restore settings in (likely) global scope which actually were defined in a local, macro private context!)

This command takes one or two arguments, the optional first one specifies an attribute that may be one of scope, which refers to the current scope and is thus the default, call, which causes any macro that is being called to be started with localization enabled by default, as well as call-fixate, which (if enabled) disallows any called macro to turn off localization: like this it can be ensured that once the current scope regains control, any changes made in deeper levels have been reverted. The latter two are mutually exclusive, and neither affects xcall. The (second) argument is interpreted as a boolean (string, see INTERNAL VARIABLES) and states whether the given attribute shall be turned on or off.

define temporary_settings { 
  set possibly_global_option1 
  localopts on 
  set localized_option1 
  set localized_option2 
  localopts scope off 
  set possibly_global_option2 
}
    

Lreply

Reply to messages that come in via known (mlist) or subscribed (mlsubscribe) mailing lists, or pretend to do so (see Mailing lists): on top of the usual reply functionality this will actively resort and even remove message recipients in order to generate a message that is supposed to be sent to a mailing list. For example it will also implicitly generate a ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header if that seems useful, regardless of the setting of the variable followup-to. For more documentation please refer to On sending mail, and non-interactive mode.

This may generate the errors ^ERR-DESTADDRREQ if no receiver has been specified, ^ERR-PERM if some addressees where rejected by expandaddr, ^ERR-NODATA if no applicable messages have been given, ^ERR-IO if an I/O error occurs, ^ERR-NOTSUP if a necessary character set conversion fails, and ^ERR-INVAL for other errors. Occurance of some of the errors depend on the value of expandaddr. Any error stops processing of further messages.

Mail

Similar to mail, but saves the message in a file named after the local part of the first recipient's address (instead of in record).

mail

(m) Takes a (list of) recipient address(es) as (an) argument(s), or asks on standard input if none were given; then collects the remaining mail content and sends it out. Unless the internal variable fullnames is set recipient addresses will be stripped from comments, names etc. For more documentation please refer to On sending mail, and non-interactive mode.

This may generate the errors ^ERR-DESTADDRREQ if no receiver has been specified, ^ERR-PERM if some addressees where rejected by expandaddr, ^ERR-NODATA if no applicable messages have been given, ^ERR-NOTSUP if multiple messages have been specified, ^ERR-IO if an I/O error occurs, ^ERR-NOTSUP if a necessary character set conversion fails, and ^ERR-INVAL for other errors. Occurance of some of the errors depend on the value of expandaddr.

mbox

(mb) The given message list is to be sent to the secondary mailbox MBOX when Mail is quit; this is the default action unless the variable hold is set. [v15 behaviour may differ] This command can only be used in a primary system mailbox.

mimetype, unmimetype

Without arguments the content of the MIME type cache will displayed; a more verbose listing will be produced if either of debug or verbose are set. When given arguments they will be joined, interpreted as shown in The mime.types files (also see HTML mail and MIME attachments), and the resulting entry will be added (prepended) to the cache. In any event MIME type sources are loaded first as necessary – mimetypes-load-control can be used to fine-tune which sources are actually loaded.

The latter command deletes all specifications of the given MIME type, thus ‘? unmimetype text/plain’ will remove all registered specifications for the MIME type ‘text/plain’. The special name ‘*’ will discard all existing MIME types, just as will ‘reset’, but which also reenables cache initialization via mimetypes-load-control.

mlist, unmlist

The latter command removes all given mailing lists, the special name ‘*’ can be used to remove all registered lists. The former will list all currently defined mailing lists (and their attributes, if any) when used without arguments; a more verbose listing will be produced if either of debug or verbose are set. Otherwise all given arguments will be added and henceforth be recognized as mailing lists. If the [Option]al regular expression support is available then any argument which contains any of the “magical” regular expression characters ‘^[]*+?|$’ (see re_format(7)) will be interpreted as one, which allows matching of many addresses with a single expression. The mlsubscribe pair of commands manages subscription attributes of mailing lists.

mimeview

[v15 behaviour may differ] Only available in interactive mode, this command allows one to display MIME parts which require external MIME handler programs to run which do not integrate in Mails normal type output (see HTML mail and MIME attachments). ([v15 behaviour may differ] No syntax to directly address parts, this restriction may vanish.) The user will be asked for each non-text part of the given message in turn whether the registered handler shall be used to display the part.

mlsubscribe, unmlsubscribe

The latter command removes the subscription attribute from all given mailing lists, the special name ‘*’ can be used to do so for any registered list. The former will list all currently defined mailing lists which have a subscription attribute when used without arguments; a more verbose listing will be produced if either of debug or verbose are set. Otherwise this attribute will be set for all given mailing lists, newly creating them as necessary (as via mlist). Also see followup-to.

Move

Similar to move, but moves the messages to a file named after the local part of the sender address of the first message (instead of in record).

move

Acts like copy but marks the messages for deletion if they were transferred successfully.

More

Like more, but also displays header fields which would not pass the headerpick selection, and all MIME parts. Identical to Page.

more

Invokes the PAGER on the given messages, even in non-interactive mode and as long as the standard output is a terminal. Identical to page.

netrc

[Option] When used without arguments or if show has been given the content of the ~/.netrc cache is shown, loading it first as necessary. If the argument is load then the cache will only be initialized and clear will remove its contents. Note that Mail will try to load the file only once, use ‘netrc clear’ to unlock further attempts. See netrc-lookup, netrc-pipe and the section On URL syntax and credential lookup; the section The .netrc file documents the file format in detail.

newmail

Checks for new mail in the current folder without committing any changes before. If new mail is present, a message is shown. If the header variable is set, the headers of each new message are also shown. This command is not available for all mailbox types.

next

(n) (like ‘+’ or “ENTER”) Goes to the next message in sequence and types it. With an argument list, types the next matching message.

New

Same as Unread.

new

Same as unread.

noop

If the current folder is accessed via a network connection, a “NOOP” command is sent, otherwise no operation is performed.

Page

Like page, but also displays header fields which would not pass the headerpick selection, and all MIME parts. Identical to More.

page

Invokes the PAGER on the given messages, even in non-interactive mode and as long as the standard output is a terminal. Identical to more.

Pipe

Like pipe but also pipes header fields which would not pass the headerpick selection, and all parts of MIME ‘multipart/alternative’ messages.

pipe

(pi) Takes an optional message list and shell command (that defaults to cmd), and pipes the messages through the command. If the page variable is set, every message is followed by a formfeed character.

preserve

(pre) A synonym for hold.

Print

(P) Alias for Type.

print

(p) Research UNIX equivalent of type.

quit

(q) Terminates the session, saving all undeleted, unsaved messages in the current secondary mailbox MBOX, preserving all messages marked with hold or preserve or never referenced in the system inbox, and removing all other messages from the primary system mailbox. If new mail has arrived during the session, the message “You have new mail” will be shown. If given while editing a mailbox file with the command line option -f, then the edit file is rewritten. A return to the shell is effected, unless the rewrite of edit file fails, in which case the user can escape with the exit command. The optional status number argument will be passed through to exit(3). [v15 behaviour may differ] For now it can happen that the given status will be overwritten, later this will only occur if a later error needs to be reported onto an otherwise success indicating status.

read

[Only new quoting rules] Read a line from standard input, or the channel set active via readctl, and assign the data, which will be split as indicated by ifs, to the given variables. The variable names are checked by the same rules as documented for vput, and the same error codes will be seen in !; the exit status ? indicates the number of bytes read, it will be ‘-1’ with the error number ! set to ^ERR-BADF in case of I/O errors, or ^ERR-NONE upon End-Of-File. If there are more fields than variables, assigns successive fields to the last given variable. If there are less fields than variables, assigns the empty string to the remains.

? read a b c 
   H  e  l  l  o 
? echo "<$a> <$b> <$c>" 
<H> <e> <l  l  o> 
? wysh set ifs=:; read a b c;unset ifs 
hey2.0,:"'you    ",:world!:mars.: 
? echo $?/$^ERRNAME / <$a><$b><$c> 
0/NONE / <hey2.0,><"'you    ",><world!:mars.:><><>
    

readall

[Only new quoting rules] Read anything from standard input, or the channel set active via readctl, and assign the data to the given variable. The variable name is checked by the same rules as documented for vput, and the same error codes will be seen in !; the exit status ? indicates the number of bytes read, it will be ‘-1’ with the error number ! set to ^ERR-BADF in case of I/O errors, or ^ERR-NONE upon End-Of-File. [v15 behaviour may differ] The input data length is restricted to 31-bits.

readctl

[Only new quoting rules] Manages input channels for read and readall, to be used to avoid complicated or impracticable code, like calling read from within a macro in non-interactive mode. Without arguments, or when the first argument is show, a listing of all known channels is printed. Channels can otherwise be created, and existing channels can be set active and removed by giving the string used for creation.

The channel name is expected to be a file descriptor number, or, if parsing the numeric fails, an input file name that undergoes Filename transformations. E.g. (this example requires a modern shell):

$ LC_ALL=C printf 'echon "hey, "\nread a\nyou\necho $a' |\ 
  LC_ALL=C mail -R# 
hey, you 
$ LC_ALL=C printf 'echon "hey, "\nread a\necho $a' |\ 
  LC_ALL=C 6<<< 'you' mail -R#X'readctl create 6' 
hey, you
    

remove

Removes the named files or directories. Filename transformations including shell pathname wildcard pattern expansions (glob(7)) are performed on the arguments. If a name refer to a mailbox, e.g., a Maildir mailbox, then a mailbox type specific removal will be performed, deleting the complete mailbox. The user is asked for confirmation in interactive mode.

rename

Takes the name of an existing folder and the name for the new folder and renames the first to the second one. Filename transformations including shell pathname wildcard pattern expansions (glob(7)) are performed on both arguments. Both folders must be of the same type.

Reply

(R) Identical to reply except that it replies to only the sender of each message of the given list, by using the first message as the template to quote, for the ‘Subject:’ etc.; setting flipr will exchange this command with reply.

reply

(r) Take a message and group-responds to it by addressing the sender and all recipients, subject to alternates processing. followup-to, followup-to-honour, reply-to-honour as well as recipients-in-cc influence response behaviour. Unless the internal variable fullnames is set recipient addresses will be stripped from comments, names etc. quote as well as quote-as-attachment configure whether responded-to message shall be quoted etc.; setting flipr will exchange this command with Reply. The command Lreply offers special support for replying to mailing lists. For more documentation please refer to On sending mail, and non-interactive mode.

This may generate the errors ^ERR-DESTADDRREQ if no receiver has been specified, ^ERR-PERM if some addressees where rejected by expandaddr, ^ERR-NODATA if no applicable messages have been given, ^ERR-IO if an I/O error occurs, ^ERR-NOTSUP if a necessary character set conversion fails, and ^ERR-INVAL for other errors. Occurance of some of the errors depend on the value of expandaddr. Any error stops processing of further messages.

replyall

Similar to reply, but initiates a group-reply regardless of the value of flipr.

replysender

Similar to Reply, but responds to the sender only regardless of the value of flipr.

Resend

Like resend, but does not add any header lines. This is not a way to hide the sender's identity, but useful for sending a message again to the same recipients.

resend

Takes a list of messages and a user name and sends each message to the named user. ‘Resent-From:’ and related header fields are prepended to the new copy of the message. Saving in record is only performed if record-resent is set.

This may generate the errors ^ERR-DESTADDRREQ if no receiver has been specified, ^ERR-PERM if some addressees where rejected by expandaddr, ^ERR-NODATA if no applicable messages have been given, ^ERR-IO if an I/O error occurs, ^ERR-NOTSUP if a necessary character set conversion fails, and ^ERR-INVAL for other errors. Occurance of some of the errors depend on the value of expandaddr. Any error stops processing of further messages.

Respond

Same as Reply.

respond

Same as reply.

respondall

Same as replyall.

respondsender

Same as replysender.

retain

(ret) Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

return

Only available inside the scope of a defined macro or an account, this will stop evaluation of any further macro content, and return execution control to the caller. The two optional parameters must be specified as positive decimal numbers and default to the value 0: the first argument specifies the signed 32-bit return value (stored in ? [v15 behaviour may differ] and later extended to signed 64-bit), the second the signed 32-bit error number (stored in !). As documented for ? a non-0 exit status may cause the program to exit.

Save

(S) Similar to save, but saves the messages in a file named after the local part of the sender of the first message instead of (in record and) taking a filename argument; the variable outfolder is inspected to decide on the actual storage location.

save

(s) Takes a message list and a filename and appends each message in turn to the end of the file. Filename transformations including shell pathname wildcard pattern expansions (glob(7)) is performed on the filename. If no filename is given, the secondary mailbox MBOX is used. The filename in quotes, followed by the generated character count is echoed on the user's terminal. If editing a primary system mailbox the messages are marked for deletion. Filename transformations will be applied. To filter the saved header fields to the desired subset use the ‘save’ slot of the white- and blacklisting command headerpick.

savediscard

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

saveignore

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

saveretain

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

search

Takes a message specification (list) and displays a header summary of all matching messages, as via headers. This command is an alias of from. Also see Specifying messages.

seen

Takes a message list and marks all messages as having been read.

set, unset

(se, [Only new quoting rules] uns) The latter command will delete all given global variables, or only block-scope local ones if the local command modifier has been used. The former, when used without arguments, will show all currently known variables, being more verbose if either of debug or verbose is set. Remarks: this list mode will not automatically link-in known ENVIRONMENT variables, but only explicit addressing will, e.g., via varshow, using a variable in an if condition or a string passed to echo, explicit setting, as well as some program-internal use cases.

Otherwise the given variables (and arguments) are set or adjusted. Arguments are of the form ‘name=value’ (no space before or after ‘=’), or plain ‘name’ if there is no value, i.e., a boolean variable. If a name begins with ‘no’, as in ‘set nosave’, the effect is the same as invoking the unset command with the remaining part of the variable (‘unset save’). [v15 behaviour may differ] In conjunction with the wysh (or local) command prefix(es) Shell-style argument quoting can be used to quote arguments as necessary. [v15 behaviour may differ] Otherwise quotation marks may be placed around any part of the assignment statement to quote blanks or tabs.

When operating in global scope any ‘name’ that is known to map to an environment variable will automatically cause updates in the program environment (unsetting a variable in the environment requires corresponding system support) — use the command environ for further environmental control. If the command modifier local has been used to alter the command to work in block-scope all variables have values (may they be empty), and creation of names which shadow INTERNAL VARIABLES is actively prevented ([v15 behaviour may differ] shadowing of linked ENVIRONMENT variables and free-form versions of variable chains is not yet detected). Also see varshow and the sections INTERNAL VARIABLES and ENVIRONMENT.

? wysh set indentprefix=' -> ' 
? wysh set atab=$'' aspace=' ' zero=0
    

shcodec

Apply shell quoting rules to the given raw-data arguments. Supports vput (see Command modifiers). The first argument specifies the operation: [+]e[ncode] or d[ecode] cause shell quoting to be applied to the remains of the line, and expanded away thereof, respectively. If the former is prefixed with a plus-sign, the quoted result will not be roundtrip enabled, and thus can be decoded only in the very same environment that was used to perform the encode; also see mle-quote-rndtrip. If the coding operation fails the error number ! is set to ^ERR-CANCELED, and the unmodified input is used as the result; the error number may change again due to output or result storage errors.

shell

[Only new quoting rules] (sh) Invokes an interactive version of the shell, and returns its exit status.

shortcut, unshortcut

Without arguments the list of all currently defined shortcuts is shown, with one argument the expansion of the given shortcut. Otherwise all given arguments are treated as pairs of shortcuts and their expansions, creating new or changing already existing shortcuts, as necessary. The latter command will remove all given shortcuts, the special name ‘*’ will remove all registered shortcuts.

shift

[Only new quoting rules] Shift the positional parameter stack (starting at 1) by the given number (which must be a positive decimal), or 1 if no argument has been given. It is an error if the value exceeds the number of positional parameters. If the given number is 0, no action is performed, successfully. The stack as such can be managed via vpospar. Note this command will fail in account and hook macros unless the positional parameter stack has been explicitly created in the current context via vpospar.

show

Like type, but performs neither MIME decoding nor decryption, so that the raw message text is shown.

size

(si) Shows the size in characters of each message of the given message-list.

sleep

[Only new quoting rules] Sleep for the specified number of seconds (and optionally milliseconds), by default interruptably. If a third argument is given the sleep will be uninterruptible, otherwise the error number ! will be set to ^ERR-INTR if the sleep has been interrupted. The command will fail and the error number will be ^ERR-OVERFLOW if the given duration(s) overflow the time datatype, and ^ERR-INVAL if the given durations are no valid integers.

sort, unsort

The latter command disables sorted or threaded mode, returns to normal message order and, if the header variable is set, displays a header summary. The former command shows the current sorting criterion when used without an argument, but creates a sorted representation of the current folder otherwise, and changes the next command and the addressing modes such that they refer to messages in the sorted order. Message numbers are the same as in regular mode. If the header variable is set, a header summary in the new order is also displayed. Automatic folder sorting can be enabled by setting the autosort variable, as in, e.g., ‘set autosort=thread’. Possible sorting criterions are:

date

Sort the messages by their ‘Date:’ field, that is by the time they were sent.

from

Sort messages by the value of their ‘From:’ field, that is by the address of the sender. If the showname variable is set, the sender's real name (if any) is used.

size

Sort the messages by their size.

spam

[Option] Sort the message by their spam score, as has been classified by spamrate.

status

Sort the messages by their message status.

subject

Sort the messages by their subject.

thread

Create a threaded display.

to

Sort messages by the value of their ‘To:’ field, that is by the address of the recipient. If the showname variable is set, the recipient's real name (if any) is used.

source

[Only new quoting rules] (so) The source command reads commands from the given file. Filename transformations will be applied. If the given expanded argument ends with a vertical bar ‘|’ then the argument will instead be interpreted as a shell command and Mail will read the output generated by it. Dependent on the settings of posix and errexit, and also dependent on whether the command modifier ignerr had been used, encountering errors will stop sourcing of the given input. [v15 behaviour may differ] Note that source cannot be used from within macros that execute as folder-hooks or accounts, i.e., it can only be called from macros that were called.

source_if

[Only new quoting rules] The difference to source (beside not supporting pipe syntax aka shell command input) is that this command will not generate an error nor warn if the given file argument cannot be opened successfully.

spamclear

[Option] Takes a list of messages and clears their ‘is-spam’ flag.

spamforget

[Option] Takes a list of messages and causes the spam-interface to forget it has ever used them to train its Bayesian filter. Unless otherwise noted the ‘is-spam’ flag of the message is inspected to chose whether a message shall be forgotten to be “ham” or “spam”.

spamham

[Option] Takes a list of messages and informs the Bayesian filter of the spam-interface that they are “ham”. This also clears the ‘is-spam’ flag of the messages in question.

spamrate

[Option] Takes a list of messages and rates them using the configured spam-interface, without modifying the messages, but setting their ‘is-spam’ flag as appropriate; because the spam rating headers are lost the rate will be forgotten once the mailbox is left. Refer to the manual section Handling spam for the complete picture of spam handling in Mail.

spamset

[Option] Takes a list of messages and sets their ‘is-spam’ flag.

spamspam

[Option] Takes a list of messages and informs the Bayesian filter of the spam-interface that they are “spam”. This also sets the ‘is-spam’ flag of the messages in question.

thread

[Obsolete] The same as ‘sort thread’ (consider using a ‘commandalias’ as necessary).

tls

[Only new quoting rules] TLS information and management command multiplexer to aid in Encrypted network communication. Commands support vput if so documented (see Command modifiers). The result that is shown in case of errors is always the empty string, errors can be identified via the error number !. For example, string length overflows are catched and set ! to ^ERR-OVERFLOW. Note this command of course honours the overall TLS configuration.

? vput tls result fingerprint pop3s://ex.am.ple 
? echo $?/$!/$^ERRNAME: $result
    

fingerprint

Show the tls-fingerprint-digested fingerprint of the certificate of the given HOST (‘server:port’, where the port defaults to the HTTPS port, 443). tls-fingerprint is actively ignored for the runtime of this command. Only available if the term ‘+sockets’ is included in features.

Top

Like top but always uses the headerpick ‘type’ slot for white- and blacklisting header fields.

top

(to) Takes a message list and types out the first toplines lines of each message on the user's terminal. Unless a special selection has been established for the ‘top’ slot of the headerpick command, the only header fields that are displayed are ‘From:’, ‘To:’, ‘CC:’, and ‘Subject:’. Top will always use the ‘type’ headerpick selection instead. It is possible to apply compression to what is displayed by setting topsqueeze. Messages are decrypted and converted to the terminal character set if necessary.

touch

(tou) Takes a message list and marks the messages for saving in the secondary mailbox MBOX. Mail deviates from the POSIX standard with this command, as a following next command will display the following message instead of the current one.

Type

(T) Like type but also displays header fields which would not pass the headerpick selection, and all visualizable parts of MIME ‘multipart/alternative’ messages.

type

(t) Takes a message list and types out each message on the user's terminal. The display of message headers is selectable via headerpick. For MIME multipart messages, all parts with a content type of ‘text’, all parts which have a registered MIME type handler (see HTML mail and MIME attachments) which produces plain text output, and all ‘message’ parts are shown, others are hidden except for their headers. Messages are decrypted and converted to the terminal character set if necessary. The command mimeview can be used to display parts which are not displayable as plain text.

unaccount

See account.

unalias

(una) See alias.

unanswered

See answered.

unbind

See bind.

uncollapse

See collapse.

uncolour

See colour.

undefine

See define.

undelete

See delete.

undraft

See draft.

unflag

See flag.

unfwdignore

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

unfwdretain

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

unignore

Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

unmimetype

See mimetype.

unmlist

See mlist.

unmlsubscribe

See mlsubscribe.

Unread

Same as unread.

unread

Takes a message list and marks each message as not having been read.

unretain

Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

unsaveignore

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

unsaveretain

[Obsolete] Superseded by the multiplexer headerpick.

unset

[Only new quoting rules] (uns) See set.

unshortcut

See shortcut.

unsort

See short.

unthread

[Obsolete] Same as unsort.

urlcodec

Perform URL percent codec operations on the raw-data argument, rather according to RFC 3986. Supports vput (see Command modifiers), and manages the error number !. This is a character set agnostic and thus locale dependent operation, and it may decode bytes which are invalid in the current ttycharset. [v15 behaviour may differ] This command does not know about URLs beside that.

The first argument specifies the operation: e[ncode] or d[ecode] perform plain URL percent en- and decoding, respectively. p[ath]enc[ode] and p[ath]dec[ode] perform a slightly modified operation which should be better for pathnames: it does not allow a tilde ‘~’, and will neither accept hyphen-minus ‘-’ nor dot ‘’. as an initial character. The remains of the line form the URL data which is to be converted. If the coding operation fails the error number ! is set to ^ERR-CANCELED, and the unmodified input is used as the result; the error number may change again due to output or result storage errors.

varshow

[Only new quoting rules] This command produces the same output as the listing mode of set, including verboseity adjustments, but only for the given variables.

verify

[Option] Takes a message list and verifies each message. If a message is not a S/MIME signed message, verification will fail for it. The verification process checks if the message was signed using a valid certificate, if the message sender's email address matches one of those contained within the certificate, and if the message content has been altered.

version

Shows the version and features of Mail, as well as the build and running system environment. This command can produce a more verbose output, and supports vput (see Command modifiers).

vexpr

[Only new quoting rules] Evaluate arguments according to a given operator. This is a multiplexer command which can be used to perform signed 64-bit numeric calculations as well as byte string and string operations. It uses polish notation, i.e., the operator is the first argument and defines the number and type, and the meaning of the remaining arguments. An empty argument is replaced with a 0 if a number is expected. Supports vput (see Command modifiers).

The result that is shown in case of errors is always ‘-1’ for usage errors and numeric operations, and the empty string for byte string and string operations; if the latter two fail to provide result data for “soft” errors, e.g., when a search operation failed, they also set the ! error number to ^ERR-NODATA. Except when otherwise noted numeric arguments are parsed as signed 64-bit numbers, and errors will be reported in the error number ! as the numeric error ^ERR-RANGE.

Numeric operations work on one or two signed 64-bit integers. Numbers prefixed with ‘0x’ or ‘0X’ are interpreted as hexadecimal (base 16) numbers, whereas ‘0’ indicates octal (base 8), and ‘0b’ as well as ‘0B’ denote binary (base 2) numbers. It is possible to use any base in between 2 and 36, inclusive, with the ‘BASE#number’ notation, where the base is given as an unsigned decimal number, e.g., ‘16#AFFE’ is a different way of specifying a hexadecimal number. Unsigned interpretation of a number can be enforced by prefixing an ‘u’ (case-insensitively), e.g., ‘u-110’; this is not necessary for power-of-two bases (2, 4, 8, 16 and 32), which will be interpreted as unsigned by default, but it still makes a difference regarding overflow detection and overflow constant. It is possible to enforce signed interpretation by (instead) prefixing a ‘s’ (case-insensitively).

One integer is expected by assignment (equals sign ‘=’), which does nothing but parsing the argument, thus detecting validity and possible overflow conditions, and unary not (tilde ‘~’), which creates the bitwise complement. Two integers are used by addition (plus sign ‘+’), subtraction (hyphen-minus ‘-’), multiplication (asterisk ‘*’), division (solidus ‘/’) and modulo (percent sign ‘%’), as well as for the bitwise operators logical or (vertical bar ‘|’, to be quoted) , bitwise and (ampersand ‘&’, to be quoted) , bitwise xor (circumflex ‘^’), the bitwise signed left- and right shifts (‘<<’, ‘>>’), as well as for the unsigned right shift ‘>>>’.

Another numeric operation is pbase, which takes a number base in between 2 and 36, inclusive, and will act on the second number given just the same as what equals sign ‘=’ does, but the number result will be formatted in the base given.

All numeric operators can be prefixed with a commercial at ‘@’, e.g., ‘@*’: this will turn the operation into a saturated one, which means that overflow errors and division and modulo by zero are no longer reported via the exit status, but the result will linger at the minimum or maximum possible value, instead of overflowing (or trapping). This is true also for the argument parse step. For the bitwise shifts, the saturated maximum is 63. Any catched overflow will be reported via the error number ! as ^ERR-OVERFLOW.

? vexpr @- +1 -9223372036854775808 
? echo $?/$!/$^ERRNAME
    

Character set agnostic string functions have no notion of locale settings and character sets.

file-expand

Performs the usual Filename transformations on its argument.

random

Generates a random string of the given length, or of PATH_MAX bytes (a constant from /usr/include) if the value 0 is given; the random string will be base64url encoded according to RFC 4648, and thus be usable as a (portable) filename.

Byte string operations work on 8-bit bytes and have no notion of locale settings and character sets, effectively assuming ASCII data.

length

Queries the length of the given argument.

hash

Calculates the Chris Torek hash of the given argument.

find

Byte-searches in the first for the second argument. Shows the resulting 0-based offset shall it have been found.

ifind

Identical to find, but works case-insensitively according to the rules of the ASCII character set.

substring

Creates a substring of its first argument. The second argument is the 0-based starting offset, a negative one counts from the end; the optional third argument specifies the length of the desired result, a negative length leaves off the given number of bytes at the end of the original string, by default the entire string is used; this operation tries to work around faulty arguments (set verbose for error logs), but reports them via the error number ! as ^ERR-OVERFLOW.

trim

Trim away whitespace characters from both ends of the argument.

trim-front

Trim away whitespace characters from the begin of the argument.

trim-end

Trim away whitespace characters from the end of the argument.

String operations work, sufficient support provided, according to the active user's locale encoding and character set (see Character sets).

makeprint

(One-way) Converts the argument to something safely printable on the terminal.

regex

[Option] A string operation that will try to match the first argument with the regular expression given as the second argument. If the optional third argument has been given then instead of showing the match offset a replacement operation is performed: the third argument is treated as if specified within dollar-single-quote (see Shell-style argument quoting), and any occurrence of a positional parameter, e.g., 1, is replaced by the corresponding match group of the regular expression:

? vput vexpr res regex bananarama \ 
    (.*)NanA(.*) '\${1}au\$2' 
? echo $?/$!/$^ERRNAME: $res
        

iregex

On otherwise identical case-insensitive equivalent to regex:

? vput vexpr res ire bananarama \ 
    (.*)NanA(.*) '\${1}au\$2' 
? echo $?/$!/$^ERRNAME: $res
        

vpospar

[Only new quoting rules] Manage the positional parameter stack (see 1, #, *, @ as well as shift). If the first argument is ‘clear’, then the positional parameter stack of the current context, or the global one, if there is none, is cleared. If it is ‘set’, then the remaining arguments will be used to (re)create the stack, if the parameter stack size limit is excessed an ^ERR-OVERFLOW error will occur.

If the first argument is ‘quote’, a round-trip capable representation of the stack contents is created, with each quoted parameter separated from each other with the first character of ifs, and followed by the first character of if-ws, if that is not empty and not identical to the first. If that results in no separation at all a space character is used. This mode supports vput (see Command modifiers). I.e., the subcommands ‘set’ and ‘quote’ can be used (in conjunction with eval) to (re)create an argument stack from and to a single variable losslessly.

? vpospar set hey, "'you    ", world! 
? echo $#: <${1}><${2}><${3}> 
? vput vpospar x quote 
? vpospar clear 
? echo $#: <${1}><${2}><${3}> 
? eval vpospar set ${x} 
? echo $#: <${1}><${2}><${3}>
    

visual

(v) Takes a message list and invokes the VISUAL display editor on each message. Modified contents are discarded unless the writebackedited variable is set, and are not used unless the mailbox can be written to and the editor returns a successful exit status. edit can be used instead for a less display oriented editor.

write

(w) For conventional messages the body without all headers is written. The original message is never marked for deletion in the originating mail folder. The output is decrypted and converted to its native format as necessary. If the output file exists, the text is appended. If a message is in MIME multipart format its first part is written to the specified file as for conventional messages, handling of the remains depends on the execution mode. No special handling of compressed files is performed.

In interactive mode the user is consecutively asked for the filenames of the processed parts. For convience saving of each part may be skipped by giving an empty value, the same result as writing it to /dev/null. Shell piping the part content by specifying a leading vertical bar ‘|’ character for the filename is supported. Other user input undergoes the usual Filename transformations, including shell pathname wildcard pattern expansions (glob(7)) and shell variable expansion for the message as such, not the individual parts, and contents of the destination file are overwritten if the file previously existed.

[v15 behaviour may differ] In non-interactive mode any part which does not specify a filename is ignored, and suspicious parts of filenames of the remaining parts are URL percent encoded (as via urlcodec) to prevent injection of malicious character sequences, resulting in a filename that will be written into the current directory. Existing files will not be overwritten, instead the part number or a dot are appended after a number sign ‘#’ to the name until file creation succeeds (or fails due to other reasons).

xcall

[Only new quoting rules] The sole difference to call is that the new macro is executed in place of the current one, which will not regain control: all resources of the current macro will be released first. This implies that any setting covered by localopts will be forgotten and covered variables will become cleaned up. If this command is not used from within a called macro it will silently be (a more expensive variant of) call.

xit

(x) A synonym for exit.

z

[Only new quoting rules] Mail presents message headers in screenfuls as described under the headers command. Without arguments this command scrolls to the next window of messages, likewise if the argument is ‘+’. An argument of ‘-’ scrolls to the last, ‘^’ scrolls to the first, and ‘$’ to the last screen of messages. A number argument prefixed by ‘+’ or ‘-’ indicates that the window is calculated in relation to the current position, and a number without a prefix specifies an absolute position.

Z

[Only new quoting rules] Similar to z, but scrolls to the next or previous window that contains at least one ‘new’ or flagged message.

COMMAND ESCAPES

~~ string

Insert the string of text in the message prefaced by a single ‘~’. (If the escape character has been changed, that character must be doubled instead.)

~! command

Execute the indicated shell command which follows, replacing unescaped exclamation marks with the previously executed command if the internal variable bang is set, then return to the message.

~.

End compose mode and send the message. The hooks on-compose-splice-shell and on-compose-splice, in order, will be called when set, after which askatend will be checked, a set on-compose-leave hook will be called, autocc and autobcc will be joined in if set, asksend will be honoured in interactive mode, finally a given message-inject-tail will be incorporated, after which the compose mode is left.

~: Mail-command or ~_ Mail-command

Execute the given Mail command. Not all commands, however, are allowed.

~< filename

Identical to ~r.

~<! command

command is executed using the shell. Its standard output is inserted into the message.

~?

[Option] Write a summary of command escapes.

~@ [

filename...

]

Append or edit the list of attachments. Does not manage the error number ! and the exit status ? (please use ~^ instead if this is a concern). The append mode expects a list of filename arguments as shell tokens (see Shell-style argument quoting; token-separating commas are ignored, too), to be interpreted as documented for the command line option -a, with the message number exception as below.

Without filename arguments the attachment list is edited, entry by entry; if a filename is left empty, that attachment is deleted from the list; once the end of the list is reached either new attachments may be entered or the session can be quit by committing an empty “new” attachment. In non-interactive mode or in batch mode (-#) the list of attachments is effectively not edited but instead recreated; again, an empty input ends list creation.

For all modes, if a given filename solely consists of the number sign ‘#’ followed by either a valid message number of the currently active mailbox, or by a period ‘.’, referring to the current message of the active mailbox, the so-called “dot”, then the given message is attached as a ‘message/rfc822’ MIME message part. The number sign must be quoted to avoid misinterpretation with the shell comment character.

~| command

Pipe the message text through the specified filter command. If the command gives no output or terminates abnormally, retain the original text of the message. E.g., the command fmt(1) is often used as a rejustifying filter.

If the first character of the command is a vertical bar, then the entire message including header fields is subject to the filter command, e.g., ‘~|| echo Fcc: /tmp/test; cat’ will prepend a file-carbon-copy message header. Also see ~e, ~v.

~^ cmd [

subcmd [

arg3 [

arg4

]

]

]

Low-level compose mode command which shares the semantic with digmsg and is meant for scripted message access, i.e., for on-compose-splice and on-compose-splice-shell. The used protocol is likely subject to changes, and therefore the mentioned hooks receive the used protocol version as an initial line. In general the first field of a response line represents a status code which specifies whether a command was successful or not, whether result data is to be expected, and if, the format of the result data. Does not manage the error number ! and the exit status ?, because errors are reported via the protocol (hard errors like I/O failures cannot be handled).

This command has read-only access to several virtual pseudo headers in the Mail private namespace which optionally (except for the non-optional first) exist in compose mode:

‘Mailx-Command:’

The name of the command that generates the message, one of ‘forward’, ‘Lreply’, ‘mail’, ‘Reply’, ‘reply’, ‘resend’.

‘Mailx-Raw-To:’

 

‘Mailx-Raw-Cc:’

 

‘Mailx-Raw-Bcc:’

Represent the frozen initial state of these headers before any transformation (e.g., alias, alternates, recipients-in-cc etc.) took place.

‘Mailx-Orig-From:’

 

‘Mailx-Orig-To:’

 

‘Mailx-Orig-Cc:’

 

‘Mailx-Orig-Bcc:’

The values of said headers of the original message which has been addressed by any of reply, forward, resend.

Error status code lines may optionally contain additional context. The status codes are:

‘210’

Status ok; the remains of the line are the result.

‘211’

Status ok; the rest of the line is optionally used for more status. What follows are lines of result addresses, terminated by an empty line. The address lines consist of two fields, the first of which is the plain address, e.g., ‘bob@exam.ple’, separated by a single ASCII SP space from the second which contains the unstripped address, even if that is identical to the first field, e.g., ‘(Lovely) Bob <bob@exam.ple>’. Non-network addressees, however, place a single-letter indicating the address type in the first field (hyphen-minus ‘-’ for files, vertical bar ‘|’ for pipes, and number sign ‘#’ for names: what is supposed to become expanded via alias), and only the second field contains a value. All the input, including the empty line, must be consumed before further commands can be issued.

‘212’

Status ok; the rest of the line is optionally used for more status. What follows are lines of furtherly unspecified string content, terminated by an empty line. All the input, including the empty line, must be consumed before further commands can be issued.

‘500’

Syntax error; invalid command.

‘501’

Syntax error in parameters or arguments.

‘505’

Error: an argument fails verification. For example an invalid address has been specified (also see expandaddr), or an attempt was made to modify anything in Mail's own namespace, or a modifying subcommand has been used on a read-only message.

‘506’

Error: an otherwise valid argument is rendered invalid due to context. For example, a second address is added to a header which may consist of a single address only.

If a command indicates failure then the message will have remained unmodified. Most commands can fail with ‘500’ if required arguments are missing (false command usage). The following (case-insensitive) commands are supported:

version

This command will print the protocol version via 210.

header

This command allows listing, inspection, and editing of message headers. Header name case is not normalized, and case-insensitive comparison should be used when matching names. The second argument specifies the subcommand to apply, one of:

list

Without a third argument a list of all yet existing headers is given via ‘210’; this command is the default command of header if no second argument has been given. A third argument restricts output to the given header only, which may fail with ‘501’ if no such field is defined.

show

Shows the content of the header given as the third argument. Dependent on the header type this may respond with ‘211’ or ‘212’; any failure results in ‘501’.

remove

This will remove all instances of the header given as the third argument, reporting ‘210’ upon success, ‘501’ if no such header can be found, and Ql 505 on Mail namespace violations.

remove-at

This will remove from the header given as the third argument the instance at the list position (counting from one!) given with the fourth argument, reporting ‘210’ upon success or ‘505’ if the list position argument is not a number or on Mail namespace violations, and ‘501’ if no such header instance exists.

insert

Create a new or an additional instance of the header given in the third argument, with the header body content as given in the fourth argument (the remains of the line). It may return ‘501’ if the third argument specifies a free-form header field name that is invalid, or if body content extraction fails to succeed, ‘505’ if any extracted address does not pass syntax and/or security checks or on Mail namespace violations, and ‘506’ to indicate prevention of excessing a single-instance header — note that ‘Subject:’ can be appended to (a space separator will be added automatically first).

‘210’ is returned upon success, followed by the name of the header and the list position of the newly inserted instance. The list position is always 1 for single-instance header fields. All free-form header fields are managed in a single list.

attachment

This command allows listing, removal and addition of message attachments. The second argument specifies the subcommand to apply, one of:

list

List all attachments via ‘212’, or report ‘501’ if no attachments exist. This command is the default command of attachment if no second argument has been given.

remove

This will remove the attachment given as the third argument, and report ‘210’ upon success or ‘501’ if no such attachment can be found. If there exists any path component in the given argument, then an exact match of the path which has been used to create the attachment is used directly, but if only the basename of that path matches then all attachments are traversed to find an exact match first, and the removal occurs afterwards; if multiple basenames match, a ‘506’ error occurs. Message attachments are treated as absolute pathnames.

If no path component exists in the given argument, then all attachments will be searched for ‘filename=’ parameter matches as well as for matches of the basename of the path which has been used when the attachment has been created; multiple matches result in a ‘506’.

remove-at

This will interpret the third argument as a number and remove the attachment at that list position (counting from one!), reporting ‘210’ upon success or ‘505’ if the argument is not a number or ‘501’ if no such attachment exists.

insert

Adds the attachment given as the third argument, specified exactly as documented for the command line option -a, and supporting the message number extension as documented for ~@. This reports ‘210’ upon success, with the index of the new attachment following, ‘505’ if the given file cannot be opened, ‘506’ if an on-the-fly performed character set conversion fails, otherwise ‘501’ is reported; this is also reported if character set conversion is requested but not available.

attribute

This uses the same search mechanism as described for remove and prints any known attributes of the first found attachment via ‘212’ upon success or ‘501’ if no such attachment can be found. The attributes are written as lines of keyword and value tuples, the keyword being separated from the rest of the line with an ASCII SP space character.

attribute-at

This uses the same search mechanism as described for remove-at and is otherwise identical to attribute.

attribute-set

This uses the same search mechanism as described for remove, and will assign the attribute given as the fourth argument, which is expected to be a value tuple of keyword and other data, separated by a ASCII SP space or TAB tabulator character. If the value part is empty, then the given attribute is removed, or reset to a default value if existence of the attribute is crucial.

It returns via ‘210’ upon success, with the index of the found attachment following, ‘505’ for message attachments or if the given keyword is invalid, and ‘501’ if no such attachment can be found. The following keywords may be used (case-insensitively):

‘filename’

Sets the filename of the MIME part, i.e., the name that is used for display and when (suggesting a name for) saving (purposes).

‘content-description’

Associate some descriptive information to the attachment's content, used in favour of the plain filename by some MUAs.

‘content-id’

May be used for uniquely identifying MIME entities in several contexts; this expects a special reference address format as defined in RFC 2045 and generates a ‘505’ upon address content verification failure.

‘content-type’

Defines the media type/subtype of the part, which is managed automatically, but can be overwritten.

‘content-disposition’

Automatically set to the string ‘attachment’.

attribute-set-at

This uses the same search mechanism as described for remove-at and is otherwise identical to attribute-set.

~A

The same as ‘~i Sign’.

~a

The same as ‘~i sign’.

~b name ...

Add the given names to the list of blind carbon copy recipients.

~c name ...

Add the given names to the list of carbon copy recipients.

~d

Read the file specified by the DEAD variable into the message.

~e

Invoke the text EDITOR on the message collected so far, then return to compose mode. ~v can be used for a more display oriented editor, and ~|| offers a pipe-based editing approach.

~F messages

Read the named messages into the message being sent, including all message headers and MIME parts. If no messages are specified, read in the current message, the “dot”.

~f messages

Read the named messages into the message being sent. If no messages are specified, read in the current message, the “dot”. Strips down the list of header fields according to the ‘type’ white- and blacklist selection of headerpick. For MIME multipart messages, only the first displayable part is included.

~H

Edit the message header fields ‘From:’, ‘Reply-To:’ and ‘Sender:’ by typing each one in turn and allowing the user to edit the field. The default values for these fields originate from the from, reply-to and sender variables.

~h

Edit the message header fields ‘To:’, ‘Cc:’, ‘Bcc:’ and ‘Subject:’ by typing each one in turn and allowing the user to edit the field.

~I variable

Insert the value of the specified variable into the message. The message remains unaltered if the variable is unset or empty. Any embedded character sequences ‘\t’ horizontal tabulator and ‘\n’ line feed are expanded in posix mode; otherwise the expansion should occur at set time ([v15 behaviour may differ] by using the command modifier wysh).

~i variable

Like ~I, but appends a newline character.

~M messages

Read the named messages into the message being sent, indented by indentprefix. If no messages are specified, read the current message, the “dot”.

~m messages

Read the named messages into the message being sent, indented by indentprefix. If no messages are specified, read the current message, the “dot”. Strips down the list of header fields according to the ‘type’ white- and blacklist selection of headerpick. For MIME multipart messages, only the first displayable part is included.

~p

Display the message collected so far, prefaced by the message header fields and followed by the attachment list, if any.

~Q

Read in the given / current message(s) according to the algorithm of quote.

~q

Abort the message being sent, copying it to the file specified by the DEAD variable if save is set.

~R filename

Identical to ~r, but indent each line that has been read by indentprefix.

~r filename [

HERE-delimiter

]

Read the named file, object to the usual Filename transformations, into the message; if (the expanded) filename is the hyphen-minus ‘-’ then standard input is used, e.g., for pasting purposes. Only in this latter mode HERE-delimiter may be given: if it is data will be read in until the given HERE-delimiter is seen on a line by itself, and encountering EOF is an error; the HERE-delimiter is a required argument in non-interactive mode; if it is single-quote quoted then the pasted content will not be expanded, [v15 behaviour may differ] otherwise a future version of Mail may perform shell-style expansion on the content.

~s string

Cause the named string to become the current subject field. Newline (NL) and carriage-return (CR) bytes are invalid and will be normalized to space (SP) characters.

~t name ...

Add the given name(s) to the direct recipient list.

~U messages

Read in the given / current message(s) excluding all headers, indented by indentprefix.

~u messages

Read in the given / current message(s), excluding all headers.

~v

Invoke the VISUAL editor on the message collected so far, then return to compose mode. ~e can be used for a less display oriented editor, and ~|| offers a pipe-based editing approach.

~w filename

Write the message onto the named file, which is object to the usual Filename transformations. If the file exists, the message is appended to it.

~x

Same as ~q, except that the message is not saved at all.

INTERNAL VARIABLES

? wysh set one=val\ 1 two="val 2" \ 
    three='val "3"' four=$'val \'4\''; \ 
    varshow one two three four; \ 
    unset one two three four

Initial settings

Variables

?

(Read-only) The exit status of the last command, or the return value of the macro called last. This status has a meaning in the state machine: in conjunction with errexit any non-0 exit status will cause a program exit, and in posix mode any error while loading (any of the) resource files will have the same effect. ignerr, one of the Command modifiers, can be used to instruct the state machine to ignore errors.

!

(Read-only) The current error number (errno(3)), which is set after an error occurred; it is also available via ^ERR, and the error name and documentation string can be queried via ^ERRNAME and ^ERRDOC. [v15 behaviour may differ] This machinery is new and the error number is only really usable if a command explicitly states that it manages the variable !, for others errno will be used in case of errors, or ^ERR-INVAL if that is 0: it thus may or may not reflect the real error. The error number may be set with the command return.

^

(Read-only) This is a multiplexer variable which performs dynamic expansion of the requested state or condition, of which there are:

^ERR, ^ERRDOC, ^ERRNAME

The number, documentation, and name of the current errno(3), respectively, which is usually set after an error occurred. The documentation is an [Option], the name is used if not available. [v15 behaviour may differ] This machinery is new and is usually reliable only if a command explicitly states that it manages the variable !, which is effectively identical to ^ERR. Each of those variables can be suffixed with a hyphen minus followed by a name or number, in which case the expansion refers to the given error. Note this is a direct mapping of (a subset of) the system error values:

define work { 
  eval echo \$1: \$^ERR-$1:\ 
    \$^ERRNAME-$1: \$^ERRDOC-$1 
  vput vexpr i + "$1" 1 
  if [ $i -lt 16 ] 
    \xcall work $i 
  end 
} 
call work 0
        

*

(Read-only) Expands all positional parameters (see 1), separated by the first character of the value of ifs. [v15 behaviour may differ] The special semantics of the equally named special parameter of the sh(1) are not yet supported.

@

(Read-only) Expands all positional parameters (see 1), separated by a space character. If placed in double quotation marks, each positional parameter is properly quoted to expand to a single parameter again.

#

(Read-only) Expands to the number of positional parameters, i.e., the size of the positional parameter stack in decimal.

0

(Read-only) Inside the scope of a defined and called macro this expands to the name of the calling macro, or to the empty string if the macro is running from top-level. For the [Option]al regular expression search and replace operator of vexpr this expands to the entire matching expression. It represents the program name in global context.

1

(Read-only) Access of the positional parameter stack. All further parameters can be accessed with this syntax, too, e.g., ‘2’, ‘3’ etc.; positional parameters can be shifted off the stack by calling shift. The parameter stack contains, e.g., the arguments of a called defined macro, the matching groups of the [Option]al regular expression search and replace expression of vexpr, and can be explicitly created or overwritten with the command vpospar.

account

(Read-only) Is set to the active account.

add-file-recipients

(Boolean) When file or pipe recipients have been specified, mention them in the corresponding address fields of the message instead of silently stripping them from their recipient list. By default such addressees are not mentioned.

allnet

(Boolean) Causes only the local part to be evaluated when comparing addresses.

append

(Boolean) Causes messages saved in the secondary mailbox MBOX to be appended to the end rather than prepended. This should always be set.

askatend

(Boolean) Causes the prompts for ‘Cc:’ and ‘Bcc:’ lists to appear after the message has been edited.

askattach

(Boolean) If set, Mail asks for files to attach at the end of each message. An empty line finalizes the list.

askcc

(Boolean) Causes the user to be prompted for carbon copy recipients (at the end of each message if askatend or bsdcompat are set).

askbcc

(Boolean) Causes the user to be prompted for blind carbon copy recipients (at the end of each message if askatend or bsdcompat are set).

asksend

(Boolean) Causes the user to be prompted for confirmation to send the message or reenter compose mode after having been shown an envelope summary. This is by default enabled.

asksign

(Boolean)[Option] Causes the user to be prompted if the message is to be signed at the end of each message. The smime-sign variable is ignored when this variable is set.

asksub

(Boolean) Causes Mail to prompt for the subject upon entering compose mode unless a subject already exists.

attrlist

A sequence of characters to display in the ‘attribute’ column of the headline as shown in the display of headers; each for one type of messages (see Message states), with the default being ‘NUROSPMFAT+-$~’ or ‘NU  *HMFAT+-$~’ if the bsdflags variable is set, in the following order:

‘N’

new.

‘U’

unread but old.

‘R’

new but read.

‘O’

read and old.

‘S’

saved.

‘P’

preserved.

‘M’

mboxed.

‘F’

flagged.

‘A’

answered.

‘T’

draft.

‘+’

[v15 behaviour may differ] start of a (collapsed) thread in threaded mode (see autosort, thread);

‘-’

[v15 behaviour may differ] an uncollapsed thread in threaded mode; only used in conjunction with -L.

‘$’

classified as spam.

‘~’

classified as possible spam.

autobcc

Specifies a list of recipients to which a blind carbon copy of each outgoing message will be sent automatically.

autocc

Specifies a list of recipients to which a carbon copy of each outgoing message will be sent automatically.

autocollapse

(Boolean) Causes threads to be collapsed automatically when .Ql thread Ns ed sort mode is entered (see the collapse command).

autoprint

(Boolean) Enable automatic typeing of a(n existing) “successive” message after delete and undelete commands, e.g., the message that becomes the new “dot” is shown automatically, as via dp or dt.

autosort

Causes sorted mode (see the sort command) to be entered automatically with the value of this variable as sorting method when a folder is opened, e.g., ‘set autosort=thread’.

bang

(Boolean) Enables the substitution of all not (reverse-solidus) escaped exclamation mark ‘!’ characters by the contents of the last executed command for the ! shell escape command and ~!, one of the compose mode COMMAND ESCAPES. If this variable is not set no reverse solidus stripping is performed.

bind-timeout

[Option] Terminals generate multi-byte sequences for certain forms of input, for example for function and other special keys. Some terminals however do not write these multi-byte sequences as a whole, but byte-by-byte, and the latter is what Mail actually reads. This variable specifies the timeout in milliseconds that the MLE (see On terminal control and line editor) waits for more bytes to arrive unless it considers a sequence “complete”. The default is 200.

bsdcompat

(Boolean) Sets some cosmetical features to traditional BSD style; has the same affect as setting askatend and all other variables prefixed with ‘bsd’; it also changes the behaviour of emptystart (which does not exist in BSD).

bsdflags

(Boolean) Changes the letters shown in the first column of a header summary to traditional BSD style.

bsdheadline

(Boolean) Changes the display of columns in a header summary to traditional BSD style.

bsdmsgs

(Boolean) Changes some informational messages to traditional BSD style.

bsdorder

(Boolean) Causes the ‘Subject:’ field to appear immediately after the ‘To:’ field in message headers and with the ~h COMMAND ESCAPES.

build-cc, build-ld, build-os, build-rest

(Read-only) The build environment, including the compiler, the linker, the operating system Mail has been build for, usually taken from uname(1) via ‘uname -s’, and then lowercased, as well as all the rest that may possibly be useful to include in a bug report, respectively.

charset-7bit

The value that should appear in the ‘charset=’ parameter of ‘Content-Type:’ MIME header fields when no character set conversion of the message data was performed. This defaults to US-ASCII, and the chosen character set should be US-ASCII compatible.

charset-8bit

[Option] The default 8-bit character set that is used as an implicit last member of the variable sendcharsets. This defaults to UTF-8 if character set conversion capabilities are available, and to ISO-8859-1 otherwise (unless the operating system environment is known to always and exclusively support UTF-8 locales), in which case the only supported character set is ttycharset and this variable is effectively ignored. Refer to the section Character sets for the complete picture of character set conversion in Mail.

charset-unknown-8bit

[Option] RFC 1428 specifies conditions when internet mail gateways shall “upgrade” the content of a mail message by using a character set with the name ‘unknown-8bit’. Because of the unclassified nature of this character set Mail will not be capable to convert this character set to any other character set. If this variable is set any message part which uses the character set ‘unknown-8bit’ is assumed to really be in the character set given in the value, otherwise the (final) value of charset-8bit is used for this purpose.

This variable will also be taken into account if a MIME type (see The mime.types files) of a MIME message part that uses the ‘binary’ character set is forcefully treated as text.

cmd

The default value for the pipe command.

colour-disable

(Boolean)[Option] Forcefully disable usage of colours. Also see the section Coloured display.

colour-pager

(Boolean)[Option] Whether colour shall be used for output that is paged through PAGER. Note that pagers may need special command line options, e.g., less(1) requires the option -R and lv(1) the option -c in order to support colours. Often doing manual adjustments is unnecessary since Mail may perform adjustments dependent on the value of the environment variable PAGER (see there for more).

contact-mail, contact-web

(Read-only) Addresses for contact per email and web, respectively, e.g., for bug reports, suggestions, or help regarding Mail. The former can be used directly: ‘? eval mail $contact-mail’.

crt

In a(n interactive) terminal session, then if this valued variable is set it will be used as a threshold to determine how many lines the given output has to span before it will be displayed via the configured PAGER; Usage of the PAGER can be forced by setting this to the value ‘0’, setting it without a value will deduce the current height of the terminal screen to compute the threshold (see LINES, screen and stty(1)). [v15 behaviour may differ] At the moment this uses the count of lines of the message in wire format, which, dependent on the mime-encoding of the message, is unrelated to the number of display lines. (The software is old and historically the relation was a given thing.)

customhdr

Define a set of custom headers to be injected into newly composed or forwarded messages. A custom header consists of the field name followed by a colon ‘:’ and the field content body. Standard header field names cannot be overwritten by a custom header. Different to the command line option -C the variable value is interpreted as a comma-separated list of custom headers: to include commas in header bodies they need to become escaped with reverse solidus ‘\’. Headers can be managed more freely in compose mode via ~^.

? set customhdr='Hdr1: Body1-1\, Body1-2, Hdr2: Body2'

datefield

Controls the appearance of the ‘%d’ date and time format specification of the headline variable, that is used, for example, when viewing the summary of headers. If unset, then the local receiving date is used and displayed unformatted, otherwise the message sending ‘Date:’. It is possible to assign a strftime(3) format string and control formatting, but embedding newlines via the ‘%n’ format is not supported, and will result in display errors. The default is ‘%Y-%m-%d %H:%M’, and also see datefield-markout-older.

datefield-markout-older

Only used in conjunction with datefield. Can be used to create a visible distinction of messages dated more than a day in the future, or older than six months, a concept comparable to the -l option of the POSIX utility ls(1). If set to the empty string, then the plain month, day and year of the ‘Date:’ will be displayed, but a strftime(3) format string to control formatting can be assigned. The default is ‘%Y-%m-%d’.

debug

(Boolean) Enables debug messages and obsoletion warnings, disables the actual delivery of messages and also implies norecord as well as nosave.

disposition-notification-send

(Boolean)[Option] Emit a ‘Disposition-Notification-To:’ header (RFC 3798) with the message. This requires the from variable to be set.

dot

(Boolean) When dot is set, a period ‘.’ on a line by itself during message input in (interactive or batch -#) compose mode will be treated as end-of-message (in addition to the normal end-of-file condition). This behaviour is implied in posix mode with a set ignoreeof.

dotlock-disable

(Boolean)[Option] Disable creation of dotlock files for MBOX databases.

dotlock-ignore-error

[Obsolete](Boolean)[Option] Ignore failures when creating dotlock files. Please use dotlock-disable instead.

editalong

If this variable is set then the editor is started automatically when a message is composed in interactive mode. If the value starts with the letter ‘v’ then this acts as if ~v, otherwise as if ~e (see COMMAND ESCAPES) had been specified. The editheaders variable is implied for this automatically spawned editor session.

editheaders

(Boolean) When a message is edited while being composed, its header is included in the editable text.

emptystart

(Boolean) When entering interactive mode Mail normally writes “No mail for user” and exits immediately if a mailbox is empty or does not exist. If this variable is set Mail starts even with an empty or non-existent mailbox (the latter behaviour furtherly depends upon bsdcompat, though).

errexit

(Boolean) Let each command with a non-0 exit status, including every called macro which returns a non-0 status, cause a program exit unless prefixed by ignerr (see Command modifiers). This also affects COMMAND ESCAPES, but which use a different modifier for ignoring the error. Please refer to the variable ? for more on this topic.

escape

The first character of this value defines the escape character for COMMAND ESCAPES in compose mode. The default value is the character tilde ‘~’. If set to the empty string, command escapes are disabled.

expandaddr

If unset then file and command pipeline address targets are not allowed, and any such address will be filtered out, giving a warning message. If set then all possible recipient address specifications will be accepted unless a possible value content is more specific (also see On sending mail, and non-interactive mode); if desired so only in interactive mode, or when tilde commands were enabled explicitly via -~ or -#, the (case-insensitive) value ‘restrict’ can be used (this really acts like ‘restrict,-all,+name,+addr’, so that care for ordering issues must be taken).

The value is actually interpreted as a comma-separated list. If that contains ‘fail’ the existence of disallowed addressees is treated as a hard send error instead of only causing them to be filtered out. Address targets can be added and subtracted by prefixing with a plus sign ‘+’ or hyphen-minus ‘-’ prefix: the value ‘all’ addresses all possible address specifications, ‘file’ file targets, ‘pipe’ command pipeline targets, ‘name’ plain user names and (MTA) aliases and ‘addr’ network addresses; Targets are interpreted in the given order, so that ‘restrict,fail,+file,-all,+addr’ will cause hard errors for any non-network address recipient address unless Mail is in interactive mode or has been started with the -~ or -# command line option; in the latter case(s) any address may be used, then.

Historically invalid network addressees were silently stripped off. To change this so that any encountered invalid email address causes a hard error it must be ensured that ‘failinvaddr’ is an entry in the above list, which automatically enables network addressees; it really acts like ‘failinvaddr,+addr’, so that care for ordering issues must be taken. [v15 behaviour may differ] If the value ‘shquote’ is present a few address providers (for example -b, -c and all recipients given on the command line) will be will evaluated as if specified within dollar-single-quotes (see Shell-style argument quoting).

expandargv

Unless this variable is set additional mta (Mail-Transfer-Agent) arguments from the command line, as can be given after a -- separator, results in a program termination with failure status. The same can be accomplished by using the special (case-insensitive) value ‘fail’. A lesser strict variant is the otherwise identical ‘restrict’, which does accept such arguments in interactive mode, or if tilde commands were enabled explicitly by using one of the command line options -~ or -#. The empty value will allow unconditional usage.

features

(Read-only) String giving a list of optional features. Features are preceded with a plus sign ‘+’ if they are available, with a hyphen-minus ‘-’ otherwise. The output of the command version will include this information in a more pleasant output.

flipr

(Boolean) This setting reverses the meanings of a set of reply commands, turning the lowercase variants, which by default address all recipients included in the header of a message (reply, respond, followup) into the uppercase variants, which by default address the sender only (Reply, Respond, Followup) and vice versa. The commands replysender, respondsender, followupsender as well as replyall, respondall, followupall are not affected by the current setting of flipr.

folder

The default path under which mailboxes are to be saved: filenames that begin with the plus sign ‘+’ will have the plus sign replaced with the value of this variable if set, otherwise the plus sign will remain unchanged when doing Filename transformations; also see file for more on this topic, and know about standard imposed implications of outfolder. The value supports a subset of transformations itself, and if the non-empty value does not start with a solidus ‘/’, then the value of HOME will be prefixed automatically. Once the actual value is evaluated first, the internal variable folder-resolved will be updated for caching purposes.

folder-hook-FOLDER, folder-hook

Names a defined macro which will be called whenever a file is opened. The macro will also be invoked when new mail arrives, but message lists for commands executed from the macro only include newly arrived messages then. localopts are activated by default in a folder hook, causing the covered settings to be reverted once the folder is left again.

The specialized form will override the generic one if ‘FOLDER’ matches the file that is opened. Unlike other folder specifications, the fully expanded name of a folder, without metacharacters, is used to avoid ambiguities. However, if the mailbox resides under folder then the usual ‘+’ specification is tried in addition, e.g., if folder is “mail” (and thus relative to the user's home directory) then /home/usr1/mail/sent will be tried as ‘folder-hook-/home/usr1/mail/sent’ first, but then followed by ‘folder-hook-+sent’.

folder-resolved

(Read-only) Set to the fully resolved path of folder once that evaluation has occurred; rather internal.

followup-to

(Boolean) Controls whether a ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header is generated when sending messages to known mailing lists. Also see followup-to-honour and the commands mlist, mlsubscribe, reply and Lreply.

followup-to-honour

Controls whether a ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header is honoured when group-replying to a message via reply or Lreply. This is a quadoption; if set without a value it defaults to “yes”. Also see followup-to and the commands mlist and mlsubscribe.

forward-as-attachment

(Boolean) Original messages are normally sent as inline text with the forward command, and only the first part of a multipart message is included. With this setting enabled messages are sent as unmodified MIME ‘message/rfc822’ attachments with all of their parts included.

forward-inject-head, forward-inject-tail

The strings to put before and after the text of a message with the forward command, respectively. The former defaults to ‘-------- Original Message --------\n’. Special format directives in these strings will be expanded if possible, and if so configured the output will be folded according to quote-fold; for more please refer to quote-inject-head. These variables are ignored if the forward-as-attachment variable is set.

from

The address (or a list of addresses) to put into the ‘From:’ field of the message header, quoting RFC 5322: the author(s) of the message, that is, the mailbox(es) of the person(s) or system(s) responsible for the writing of the message. According to that RFC setting the sender variable is required if from contains more than one address. Dependent on the context these addresses are handled as if they were in the list of alternates.

If a file-based MTA is used, then from (or, if that contains multiple addresses, sender) can nonetheless be enforced to appear as the envelope sender address at the MTA protocol level (the RFC 5321 reverse-path), either by using the -r command line option (with an empty argument; see there for the complete picture on this topic), or by setting the internal variable r-option-implicit.

If the machine's hostname is not valid at the Internet (for example at a dialup machine) then either this variable or hostname ([v15-compat] a SMTP-based mta adds even more fine-tuning capabilities with smtp-hostname) have to be set: if so the message and MIME part related unique ID fields ‘Message-ID:’ and ‘Content-ID:’ will be created (except when disallowed by message-id-disable or stealthmua).

fullnames

(Boolean) Due to historical reasons comments and name parts of email addresses are removed by default when sending mail, replying to or forwarding a message. If this variable is set such stripping is not performed.

fwdheading

[Obsolete] Predecessor of forward-inject-head.

header

(Boolean) Causes the header summary to be written at startup and after commands that affect the number of messages or the order of messages in the current folder. Unless in posix mode a header summary will also be displayed on folder changes. The command line option -N can be used to set noheader.

headline

A format string to use for the summary of headers. Format specifiers in the given string start with a percent sign ‘%’ and may be followed by an optional decimal number indicating the field width — if that is negative, the field is to be left-aligned. Names and addresses are subject to modifications according to showname and showto. Valid format specifiers are:

‘%%’

A plain percent sign.

‘%>’

“Dotmark”: a space character but for the current message (“dot”), for which it expands to ‘>’ (dependent on headline-plain).

‘%<’

“Dotmark”: a space character but for the current message (“dot”), for which it expands to ‘<’ (dependent on headline-plain).

‘%$’

[Option] The spam score of the message, as has been classified via the command spamrate. Shows only a replacement character if there is no spam support.

‘%a’

Message attribute character (status flag); the actual content can be adjusted by setting attrlist.

‘%d’

The date found in the ‘Date:’ header of the message when datefield is set (the default), otherwise the date when the message was received. Formatting can be controlled by assigning a strftime(3) format string to datefield (and datefield-markout-older).

‘%e’

The indenting level in ‘thread’ed sort mode.

‘%f’

The address of the message sender.

‘%i’

The message thread tree structure. (Note that this format does not support a field width, and honours headline-plain.)

‘%l’

The number of lines of the message, if available.

‘%m’

Message number.

‘%o’

The number of octets (bytes) in the message, if available.

‘%s’

Message subject (if any).

‘%S’

Message subject (if any) in double quotes.

‘%T’

Message recipient flags: is the addressee of the message a known or subscribed mailing list – see mlist and mlsubscribe.

‘%t’

The position in threaded/sorted order.

‘U’

The value 0 except in an IMAP mailbox, where it expands to the UID of the message.

The default is ‘%>%a%m %-18f %16d %4l/%-5o %i%-s’, or ‘%>%a%m %20-f  %16d %3l/%-5o %i%-S’ if bsdcompat is set. Also see attrlist, headline-plain and headline-bidi.

headline-bidi

Bidirectional text requires special treatment when displaying headers, because numbers (in dates or for file sizes etc.) will not affect the current text direction, in effect resulting in ugly line layouts when arabic or other right-to-left text is to be displayed. On the other hand only a minority of terminals is capable to correctly handle direction changes, so that user interaction is necessary for acceptable results. Note that extended host system support is required nonetheless, e.g., detection of the terminal character set is one precondition; and this feature only works in an Unicode (i.e., UTF-8) locale.

In general setting this variable will cause Mail to encapsulate text fields that may occur when displaying headline (and some other fields, like dynamic expansions in prompt) with special Unicode control sequences; it is possible to fine-tune the terminal support level by assigning a value: no value (or any value other than ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’) will make Mail assume that the terminal is capable to properly deal with Unicode version 6.3, in which case text is embedded in a pair of U+2068 (FIRST STRONG ISOLATE) and U+2069 (POP DIRECTIONAL ISOLATE) characters. In addition no space on the line is reserved for these characters.

Weaker support is chosen by using the value ‘1’ (Unicode 6.3, but reserve the room of two spaces for writing the control sequences onto the line). The values ‘2’ and ‘3’ select Unicode 1.1 support (U+200E, LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK); the latter again reserves room for two spaces in addition.

headline-plain

(Boolean) On Unicode (UTF-8) aware terminals enhanced graphical symbols are used by default for certain entries of headline. If this variable is set only basic US-ASCII symbols will be used.

history-file

[Option] If a line editor is available then this can be set to name the (expandable) path of the location of a permanent history file; also see history-size.

history-gabby

(Boolean)[Option] Add more entries to the history as is normally done.

history-gabby-persist

(Boolean)[Option] Mail's own MLE will not save the additional history-gabby entries in persistent storage unless this variable is set. On the other hand it will not loose the knowledge of whether a persistent entry was gabby or not. Also see history-file.

history-size

[Option] Setting this variable imposes a limit on the number of concurrent history entries. If set to the value 0 then no further history entries will be added, and loading and incorporation of the history-file upon program startup can also be suppressed by doing this. Runtime changes will not be reflected before the history is saved or loaded (again).

hold

(Boolean) This setting controls whether messages are held in the system inbox, and it is set by default.

hostname

Used instead of the value obtained from uname(3) and getaddrinfo(3) as the hostname when expanding local addresses, e.g., in ‘From:’ (also see On sending mail, and non-interactive mode, especially for expansion of network addresses that contain domain-less valid user names in angle brackets). If either of from or this variable Is set the message and MIME part related unique ID fields ‘Message-ID:’ and ‘Content-ID:’ will be created (except when disallowed by message-id-disable or stealthmua). If the [Option]al IDNA support is available (see idna-disable) variable assignment is aborted when a necessary conversion fails.

Setting it to the empty string will cause the normal hostname to be used, but nonetheless enables creation of said ID fields. [v15-compat] in conjunction with the built-in SMTP mta smtp-hostname also influences the results: one should produce some test messages with the desired combination of hostname, and/or from, sender etc. first.

idna-disable

(Boolean)[Option] Can be used to turn off the automatic conversion of domain names according to the rules of IDNA (internationalized domain names for applications). Since the IDNA code assumes that domain names are specified with the ttycharset character set, an UTF-8 locale charset is required to represent all possible international domain names (before conversion, that is).

ifs

The input field separator that is used ([v15 behaviour may differ] by some functions) to determine where to split input data.

1.

Unsetting is treated as assigning the default value, ‘ \t\n’.

2.

If set to the empty value, no field splitting will be performed.

3.

If set to a non-empty value, all whitespace characters are extracted and assigned to the variable ifs-ws.

a.

ifs-ws will be ignored at the beginning and end of input. Diverging from POSIX shells default whitespace is removed in addition, which is owed to the entirely different line content extraction rules.

b.

Each occurrence of a character of ifs will cause field-splitting, any adjacent ifs-ws characters will be skipped.

ifs-ws

(Read-only) Automatically deduced from the whitespace characters in ifs.

ignore

(Boolean) Ignore interrupt signals from the terminal while entering messages; instead echo them as ‘@’ characters and discard the current line.

ignoreeof

(Boolean) Ignore end-of-file conditions (‘control-D’) in compose mode on message input and in interactive command input. If set an interactive command input session can only be left by explicitly using one of the commands exit and quit, and message input in compose mode can only be terminated by entering a period ‘.’ on a line by itself or by using the ~. COMMAND ESCAPES; Setting this implies the behaviour that dot describes in posix mode.

inbox

If this is set to a non-empty string it will specify the user's primary system mailbox, overriding MAIL and the system-dependent default, and (thus) be used to replace ‘%’ when doing Filename transformations; also see file for more on this topic. The value supports a subset of transformations itself.

indentprefix

String used by the ~m, ~M and ~R COMMAND ESCAPES and by the quote option for indenting messages, in place of the POSIX mandated default tabulator character ‘\t’. Also see quote-chars.

keep

(Boolean) If set, an empty primary system mailbox file is not removed. Note that, in conjunction with posix mode any empty file will be removed unless this variable is set. This may improve the interoperability with other mail user agents when using a common folder directory, and prevents malicious users from creating fake mailboxes in a world-writable spool directory. [v15 behaviour may differ] Only local regular (MBOX) files are covered, Maildir and other mailbox types will never be removed, even if empty.

keep-content-length

(Boolean) When (editing messages and) writing MBOX mailbox files Mail can be told to keep the ‘Content-Length:’ and ‘Lines:’ header fields that some MUAs generate by setting this variable. Since Mail does neither use nor update these non-standardized header fields (which in itself shows one of their conceptual problems), stripping them should increase interoperability in between MUAs that work with with same mailbox files. Note that, if this is not set but writebackedited, as below, is, a possibly performed automatic stripping of these header fields already marks the message as being modified. [v15 behaviour may differ] At some future time Mail will be capable to rewrite and apply an mime-encoding to modified messages, and then those fields will be stripped silently.

keepsave

(Boolean) When a message is saved it is usually discarded from the originating folder when Mail is quit. This setting causes all saved message to be retained.

line-editor-disable

(Boolean) Turn off any enhanced line editing capabilities (see On terminal control and line editor for more).

line-editor-no-defaults

(Boolean)[Option] Do not establish any default key binding.

log-prefix

Error log message prefix string (‘mail: ’).

mailbox-display

(Read-only) The name of the current mailbox (file), possibly abbreviated for display purposes.

mailbox-resolved

(Read-only) The fully resolved path of the current mailbox.

mailx-extra-rc

An additional startup file that is loaded as the last of the Resource files. Use this file for commands that are not understood by other POSIX mailx(1) implementations, i.e., mostly anything which is not covered by Initial settings.

markanswered

(Boolean) When a message is replied to and this variable is set, it is marked as having been answered. See the section Message states.

mbox-rfc4155

(Boolean) When opening MBOX mailbox databases Mail by default uses tolerant POSIX rules for detecting message boundaries (so-called ‘From_’ lines) due to compatibility reasons, instead of the stricter rules that have been standardized in RFC 4155. This behaviour can be switched to the stricter RFC 4155 rules by setting this variable. (This is never necessary for any message newly generated by Mail, it only applies to messages generated by buggy or malicious MUAs, or may occur in old MBOX databases: Mail itself will choose a proper mime-encoding to avoid false interpretation of ‘From_’ content lines in the MBOX database.)

This may temporarily be handy when Mail complains about invalid ‘From_’ lines when opening a MBOX: in this case setting this variable and re-opening the mailbox in question may correct the result. If so, copying the entire mailbox to some other file, as in ‘copy * SOME-FILE’, will perform proper, all-compatible ‘From_’ quoting for all detected messages, resulting in a valid MBOX mailbox. Finally the variable can be unset again:

define mboxfix { 
  localopts yes; wysh set mbox-rfc4155;\ 
    wysh File "${1}"; eval copy * "${2}" 
} 
call mboxfix /tmp/bad.mbox /tmp/good.mbox
    

memdebug

(Boolean) Internal development variable.

message-id-disable

(Boolean) By setting this variable the generation of ‘Message-ID:’ and ‘Content-ID:’ message and MIME part headers can be completely suppressed, effectively leaving this task up to the mta (Mail-Transfer-Agent) or the SMTP server. Note that according to RFC 5321 a SMTP server is not required to add this field by itself, so it should be ensured that it accepts messages without ‘Message-ID’.

message-inject-head

A string to put at the beginning of each new message, followed by a newline. [Obsolete] The escape sequences tabulator ‘\t’ and newline ‘\n’ are understood (use the wysh prefix when setting the variable(s) instead).

message-inject-tail

A string to put at the end of each new message, followed by a newline. [Obsolete] The escape sequences tabulator ‘\t’ and newline ‘\n’ are understood (use the wysh prefix when setting the variable(s) instead).

metoo

(Boolean) Usually, when an alias expansion contains the sender, the sender is removed from the expansion. Setting this option suppresses these removals. Note that a set metoo also causes a ‘-m’ option to be passed through to the mta (Mail-Transfer-Agent); though most of the modern MTAs no longer document this flag, no MTA is known which does not support it (for historical compatibility).

mime-allow-text-controls

(Boolean) When sending messages, each part of the message is MIME-inspected in order to classify the ‘Content-Type:’ and ‘Content-Transfer-Encoding:’ (see mime-encoding) that is required to send this part over mail transport, i.e., a computation rather similar to what the file(1) command produces when used with the ‘--mime’ option.

This classification however treats text files which are encoded in UTF-16 (seen for HTML files) and similar character sets as binary octet-streams, forcefully changing any ‘text/plain’ or ‘text/html’ specification to ‘application/octet-stream’: If that actually happens a yet unset charset MIME parameter is set to ‘binary’, effectively making it impossible for the receiving MUA to automatically interpret the contents of the part.

If this variable is set, and the data was unambiguously identified as text data at first glance (by a ‘.txt’ or ‘.html’ file extension), then the original ‘Content-Type:’ will not be overwritten.

mime-alternative-favour-rich

(Boolean) If this variable is set then rich MIME alternative parts (e.g., HTML) will be preferred in favour of included plain text versions when displaying messages, provided that a handler exists which produces output that can be (re)integrated into Mail's normal visual display. (E.g., at the time of this writing some newsletters ship their full content only in the rich HTML part, whereas the plain text part only contains topic subjects.)

mime-counter-evidence

Normally the ‘Content-Type:’ field is used to decide how to handle MIME parts. Some MUAs, however, do not use The mime.types files (also see HTML mail and MIME attachments) or a similar mechanism to correctly classify content, but specify an unspecific MIME type (‘application/octet-stream’) even for plain text attachments. If this variable is set then Mail will try to re-classify such MIME message parts, if possible, for example via a possibly existing attachment filename. A non-empty value may also be given, in which case a number is expected, actually a carrier of bits, best specified as a binary value, e.g., ‘0b1111’.

• If bit two is set (counting from 1, decimal 2) then the detected mimetype will be carried along with the message and be used for deciding which MIME handler is to be used, for example; when displaying such a MIME part the part-info will indicate the overridden content-type by showing a plus sign ‘+’.
• If bit three is set (decimal 4) then the counter-evidence is always produced and a positive result will be used as the MIME type, even forcefully overriding the parts given MIME type.
• If bit four is set (decimal 8) as a last resort the actual content of ‘application/octet-stream’ parts will be inspected, so that data which looks like plain text can be treated as such. This mode is even more relaxed when data is to be displayed to the user or used as a message quote (data consumers which mangle data for display purposes, which includes masking of control characters, for example).

mime-encoding

The MIME ‘Content-Transfer-Encoding’ to use in outgoing text messages and message parts, where applicable. (7-bit clean text messages are sent as-is, without a transfer encoding.) Valid values are:

‘8bit’

(Or ‘8b’.) 8-bit transport effectively causes the raw data be passed through unchanged, but may cause problems when transferring mail messages over channels that are not ESMTP (RFC 1869) compliant. Also, several input data constructs are not allowed by the specifications and may cause a different transfer-encoding to be used.

‘quoted-printable’

(Or ‘qp’.) Quoted-printable encoding is 7-bit clean and has the property that ASCII characters are passed through unchanged, so that an english message can be read as-is; it is also acceptable for other single-byte locales that share many characters with ASCII, like, e.g., ISO-8859-1. The encoding will cause a large overhead for messages in other character sets: e.g., it will require up to twelve (12) bytes to encode a single UTF-8 character of four (4) bytes. It is the default encoding.

‘base64’

(Or ‘b64’.) This encoding is 7-bit clean and will always be used for binary data. This encoding has a constant input:output ratio of 3:4, regardless of the character set of the input data it will encode three bytes of input to four bytes of output. This transfer-encoding is not human readable without performing a decoding step.

mimetypes-load-control

Can be used to control which of The mime.types files are loaded: if the letter ‘u’ is part of the option value, then the user's personal ~/.mime.types file will be loaded (if it exists); likewise the letter ‘s’ controls loading of the system wide /etc/mime.types; directives found in the user file take precedence, letter matching is case-insensitive. If this variable is not set Mail will try to load both files. Incorporation of the Mail-built-in MIME types cannot be suppressed, but they will be matched last (the order can be listed via mimetype).

More sources can be specified by using a different syntax: if the value string contains an equals sign ‘=’ then it is instead parsed as a comma-separated list of the described letters plus ‘f=FILENAME’ pairs; the given filenames will be expanded and loaded, and their content may use the extended syntax that is described in the section The mime.types files. Directives found in such files always take precedence (are prepended to the MIME type cache).

mta

To choose an alternate Mail-Transfer-Agent, set this option to either the full pathname of an executable (optionally prefixed with the protocol ‘file://’), or [Option]ally a SMTP a.k.a. SUBMISSION protocol URL, e.g., [v15-compat]

submissions://[user[:password]@]server[:port]

([no v15-compat]: ‘[smtp://]server[:port]’.) The default has been chosen at compile time. All supported data transfers are executed in child processes, which run asynchronously and without supervision unless either the sendwait or the verbose variable is set. If such a child receives a TERM signal, it will abort and save the message to DEAD, if so configured.

For a file-based MTA it may be necessary to set mta-argv0 in in order to choose the right target of a modern mailwrapper(8) environment. It will be passed command line arguments from several possible sources: from the variable mta-arguments if set, from the command line if given and the variable expandargv allows their use. Argument processing of the MTA will be terminated with a -- separator.

The otherwise occurring implicit usage of the following MTA command line arguments can be disabled by setting the boolean variable mta-no-default-arguments (which will also disable passing -- to the MTA): -i (for not treating a line with only a dot ‘.’ character as the end of input), -m (shall the variable metoo be set) and -v (if the verbose variable is set); in conjunction with the -r command line option Mail will also (not) pass -f as well as possibly -F.

[Option]ally Mail can send mail over SMTP a.k.a. SUBMISSION network connections to a single defined smart host by setting this variable to a SMTP or SUBMISSION URL (see On URL syntax and credential lookup). An authentication scheme can be specified via the variable chain smtp-auth. Encrypted network connections are [Option]ally available, the section Encrypted network communication should give an overview and provide links to more information on this. Note that with some mail providers it may be necessary to set the smtp-hostname variable in order to use a specific combination of from, hostname and mta. Mail also supports forwarding of all network traffic over a specified socks-proxy. The following SMTP variants may be used:

• The plain SMTP protocol (RFC 5321) that normally lives on the server port 25 and requires setting the smtp-use-starttls variable to enter a TLS encrypted session state. Assign a value like [v15-compat] ‘smtp://[user[:password]@]server[:port]’ ([no v15-compat] ‘smtp://server[:port]’) to choose this protocol.
• The so-called SMTPS which is supposed to live on server port 465 and is automatically TLS secured. Unfortunately it never became a standardized protocol and may thus not be supported by your hosts network service database – in fact the port number has already been reassigned to other protocols!
  SMTPS is nonetheless a commonly offered protocol and thus can be chosen by assigning a value like [v15-compat] ‘smtps://[user[:password]@]server[:port]’ ([no v15-compat] ‘smtps://server[:port]’); due to the mentioned problems it is usually necessary to explicitly specify the port as ‘:465’, however.
• The SUBMISSION protocol (RFC 6409) lives on server port 587 and is identically to the SMTP protocol from Mail's point of view; it requires setting smtp-use-starttls to enter a TLS secured session state; e.g., [v15-compat] ‘submission://[user[:password]@]server[:port]’.
• The SUBMISSIONS protocol (RFC 8314) that lives on server port 465 and is TLS secured by default. It can be chosen by assigning a value like [v15-compat] ‘submissions://[user[:password]@]server[:port]’. Due to the problems mentioned for SMTPS above and the fact that SUBMISSIONS is new and a successor that lives on the same port as the historical engineering mismanagement named SMTPS, it is usually necessary to explicitly specify the port as ‘:465’.

mta-arguments

Arguments to pass through to a file-based mta can be given via this variable, which is parsed according to Shell-style argument quoting into an array of arguments, and which will be joined onto MTA options from other sources, and then passed individually to the MTA: ‘? wysh set mta-arguments='-t -X "/tmp/my log"'’.

mta-no-default-arguments

(Boolean) Unless this variable is set Mail will pass some well known standard command line options to a file-based mta (Mail-Transfer-Agent), see there for more.

mta-no-receiver-arguments

(Boolean) By default a file-based mta will be passed all receiver addresses on the command line. This variable can be set to suppress any such argument.

mta-argv0

Many systems use a so-called mailwrapper(8) environment to ensure compatibility with sendmail(1). This works by inspecting the name that was used to invoke the mail delivery system. If this variable is set then the mailwrapper (the program that is actually executed when calling the file-based mta) will treat its contents as that name.

netrc-lookup-USER@HOST, netrc-lookup-HOST, netrc-lookup

(Boolean)[v15-compat][Option] Used to control usage of the user's ~/.netrc file for lookup of account credentials, as documented in the section On URL syntax and credential lookup and for the command netrc; the section The .netrc file documents the file format. Also see netrc-pipe.

netrc-pipe

[v15-compat][Option] When ~/.netrc is loaded (see netrc and netrc-lookup) then Mail will read the output of a shell pipe instead of the user's ~/.netrc file if this variable is set (to the desired shell command). This can be used to, e.g., store ~/.netrc in encrypted form: ‘? set netrc-pipe='gpg -qd ~/.netrc.pgp'’.

newfolders

[Option] If this variable has the value ‘maildir’, newly created local folders will be in Maildir instead of MBOX format.

newmail

Checks for new mail in the current folder each time the prompt is shown. A Maildir folder must be re-scanned to determine if new mail has arrived. If this variable is set to the special value ‘nopoll’ then a Maildir folder will not be rescanned completely, but only timestamp changes are detected. Maildir folders are [Option]al.

outfolder

(Boolean) Unless specified as absolute pathnames, causes the filename given in the record variable and the sender-based filenames for the Copy and Save commands to be interpreted relative to the directory given in the folder variable rather than relative to the current directory.

on-account-cleanup-ACCOUNT, on-account-cleanup

Macro hook which will be called once an account is left, as the very last step before unrolling per-account localopts. This hook is run even in case of fatal errors, and it is advisable to perform only absolutely necessary actions, like cleaning up alternates, for example. The specialized form is used in favour of the generic one if found.

on-compose-cleanup

Macro hook which will be called after the message has been sent (or not, in case of failures), as the very last step before unrolling compose mode localopts. This hook is run even in case of fatal errors, and it is advisable to perform only absolutely necessary actions, like cleaning up alternates, for example.

For compose mode hooks that may affect the message content please see on-compose-enter, on-compose-leave, on-compose-splice. [v15 behaviour may differ] This hook exists because alias, alternates, commandalias, shortcut, to name a few, are not covered by localopts: changes applied in compose mode will continue to be in effect thereafter.

on-compose-enter, on-compose-leave

Macro hooks which will be called once compose mode is entered, and after composing has been finished, but before a set message-inject-tail has been injected etc., respectively. localopts are enabled for these hooks, and changes on variables will be forgotten after the message has been sent. on-compose-cleanup can be used to perform other necessary cleanup steps.

The following (read-only) variables will be set temporarily during execution of the macros to represent respective message headers, to the empty string otherwise; most of them correspond to according virtual message headers that can be accessed via ~^, one of the COMMAND ESCAPES (also from within on-compose-splice hooks):

mailx-command

The command that generates the message.

mailx-subject

The subject.

mailx-from

from.

mailx-sender

sender.

mailx-to, mailx-cc, mailx-bcc

The list of receiver addresses as a space-separated list.

mailx-raw-to, mailx-raw-cc, mailx-raw-bcc

The list of receiver addresses before any mangling (due to, e.g., alternates, alias recipients-in-cc) as a space-separated list.

mailx-orig-from

When replying, forwarding or resending, this will be set to the ‘From:’ of the given message.

mailx-orig-to, mailx-orig-cc, mailx-orig-bcc

When replying, forwarding or resending, this will be set to the receivers of the given message.

Here is am example that injects a signature via message-inject-tail; instead using on-compose-splice to simply inject the file of desire via ~< or ~<! may be a better approach.

define t_ocl { 
  vput ! i cat ~/.mysig 
  if [ $? -eq 0 ] 
     vput vexpr message-inject-tail trim-end $i 
  end 
 
  # Alternatively 
  readctl create ~/.mysig 
  if [ $? -eq 0 ] 
    readall i 
    if [ $? -eq 0 ] 
      vput vexpr message-inject-tail trim-end $i 
    end 
    readctl remove ~/.mysig 
  end 
} 
set on-compose-leave=t_ocl
    

on-compose-splice, on-compose-splice-shell

These hooks run once the normal compose mode is finished, but before the on-compose-leave macro hook is called, the message-inject-tail is injected etc. Both hooks will be executed in a subprocess, with their input and output connected to Mail such that they can act as if they would be an interactive user. The difference in between them is that the latter is a SHELL command, whereas the former is a normal Mail macro, but which is restricted to a small set of commands (the verbose output of, e.g., list will indicate said capability). localopts are enabled for these hooks (in the parent process), causing any setting to be forgotten after the message has been sent; on-compose-cleanup can be used to perform other cleanup as necessary.

During execution of these hooks Mail will temporarily forget whether it has been started in interactive mode, (a restricted set of) COMMAND ESCAPES will always be available, and for guaranteed reproducibilities sake escape and ifs will be set to their defaults. The compose mode command ~^ has been especially designed for scriptability (via these hooks). The first line the hook will read on its standard input is the protocol version of said command escape, currently “0 0 1”: backward incompatible protocol changes have to be expected.

Care must be taken to avoid deadlocks and other false control flow: if both involved processes wait for more input to happen at the same time, or one does not expect more input but the other is stuck waiting for consumption of its output, etc. There is no automatic synchronization of the hook: it will not be stopped automatically just because it, e.g., emits ‘~x’. The hooks will however receive a termination signal if the parent enters an error condition. [v15 behaviour may differ] Protection against and interaction with signals is not yet given; it is likely that in the future these scripts will be placed in an isolated session, which is signalled in its entirety as necessary.

define ocs_signature { 
  read version 
  echo '~< ~/.mysig' # '~<! fortune pathtofortunefile' 
} 
set on-compose-splice=ocs_signature 
 
wysh set on-compose-splice-shell=$'\ 
  read version;\ 
  printf "hello $version!  Headers: ";\ 
  echo \'~^header list\';\ 
  read status result;\ 
  echo "status=$status result=$result";\ 
  ' 
 
define ocsm { 
  read version 
  echo Splice protocol version is $version 
  echo '~^h l'; read hl; vput vexpr es substring "${hl}" 0 1 
  if [ "$es" != 2 ] 
    echoerr 'Cannot read header list'; echo '~x'; xit 
  endif 
  if [ "$hl" @i!% ' cc' ] 
    echo '~^h i cc Diet is your <mirr.or>'; read es;\ 
      vput vexpr es substring "${es}" 0 1 
    if [ "$es" != 2 ] 
      echoerr 'Cannot insert Cc: header'; echo '~x' 
      # (no xit, macro finishs anyway) 
    endif 
  endif 
} 
set on-compose-splice=ocsm
    

on-resend-cleanup

[v15 behaviour may differ] Identical to on-compose-cleanup, but is only triggered by resend.

on-resend-enter

[v15 behaviour may differ] Identical to on-compose-enter, but is only triggered by resend.

page

(Boolean) If set, each message feed through the command given for pipe is followed by a formfeed character ‘\f’.

password-USER@HOST, password-HOST, password

[v15-compat] Variable chain that sets a password, which is used in case none has been given in the protocol and account-specific URL; as a last resort Mail will ask for a password on the user's terminal if the authentication method requires a password. Specifying passwords in a startup file is generally a security risk; the file should be readable by the invoking user only.

password-USER@HOST

[no v15-compat] (see the chain above for [v15-compat]) Set the password for ‘USER’ when connecting to ‘HOST’. If no such variable is defined for a host, the user will be asked for a password on standard input. Specifying passwords in a startup file is generally a security risk; the file should be readable by the invoking user only.

piperaw

(Boolean) Send messages to the pipe command without performing MIME and character set conversions.

pipe-TYPE/SUBTYPE

When a MIME message part of type ‘TYPE/SUBTYPE’ (case-insensitive) is displayed or quoted, its text is filtered through the value of this variable interpreted as a shell command. Note that only parts which can be displayed inline as plain text (see copiousoutput) are displayed unless otherwise noted, other MIME parts will only be considered by and for the command mimeview.

The special value commercial at ‘@’ forces interpretation of the message part as plain text, e.g., ‘set pipe-application/xml=@’ will henceforth display XML “as is”. (The same could also be achieved by adding a MIME type marker with the mimetype command. And [Option]ally MIME type handlers may be defined via The Mailcap files — these directives, copiousoutput has already been used, should be referred to for further documentation.

The commercial at ‘@’ can in fact be used as a trigger character to adjust usage and behaviour of a following shell command specification more thoroughly by appending more special characters which refer to further mailcap directives, e.g., the following hypothetical command specification could be used:

? set pipe-X/Y='@!++=@vim ${MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY}'
    

‘*’

The command produces plain text to be integrated in Mails output: copiousoutput.

‘#’

If set the handler will not be invoked when a message is to be quoted, but only when it will be displayed: x-mailx-noquote.

‘&’

Run the command asynchronously, i.e., without blocking Mail: x-mailx-async.

‘!’

The command must be run on an interactive terminal, Mail will temporarily release the terminal to it: needsterminal.

‘+’

Request creation of a zero-sized temporary file, the absolute pathname of which will be made accessible via the environment variable MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY: x-mailx-tmpfile. If given twice then the file will be unlinked automatically by Mail when the command loop is entered again at latest: x-mailx-tmpfile-unlink.

‘=’

Normally the MIME part content is passed to the handler via standard input; if this flag is set then the data will instead be written into MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY (x-mailx-tmpfile-fill), the creation of which is implied; note however that in order to cause deletion of the temporary file you still have to use two plus signs ‘++’ explicitly!

‘@’

To avoid ambiguities with normal shell command content you can use another commercial at to forcefully terminate interpretation of remaining characters. (Any character not in this list will have the same effect.)

Some information about the MIME part to be displayed is embedded into the environment of the shell command:

MAILX_CONTENT

The MIME content-type of the part, if known, the empty string otherwise.

MAILX_CONTENT_EVIDENCE

If mime-counter-evidence includes the carry-around-bit (2), then this will be set to the detected MIME content-type; not only then identical to MAILX_CONTENT otherwise.

MAILX_EXTERNAL_BODY_URL

MIME parts of type ‘message/external-body access-type=url’ will store the access URL in this variable, it is empty otherwise. URL targets should not be activated automatically, without supervision.

MAILX_FILENAME

The filename, if any is set, the empty string otherwise.

MAILX_FILENAME_GENERATED

A random string.

MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY

If temporary file creation has been requested through the command prefix this variable will be set and contain the absolute pathname of the temporary file.

pipe-EXTENSION

This is identical to pipe-TYPE/SUBTYPE except that ‘EXTENSION’ (normalized to lowercase using character mappings of the ASCII charset) names a file extension, e.g., ‘xhtml’. Handlers registered using this method take precedence.

pop3-auth-USER@HOST, pop3-auth-HOST, pop3-auth

[Option][v15-compat] Variable chain that sets the POP3 authentication method. The only possible value as of now is ‘plain’, which is thus the default.

pop3-bulk-load-USER@HOST, pop3-bulk-load-HOST, pop3-bulk-load

(Boolean)[Option] When accessing a POP3 server Mail loads the headers of the messages, and only requests the message bodies on user request. For the POP3 protocol this means that the message headers will be downloaded twice. If this variable is set then Mail will download only complete messages from the given POP3 server(s) instead.

pop3-keepalive-USER@HOST, pop3-keepalive-HOST, pop3-keepalive

[Option] POP3 servers close the connection after a period of inactivity; the standard requires this to be at least 10 minutes, but practical experience may vary. Setting this variable to a numeric value greater than ‘0’ causes a ‘NOOP’ command to be sent each value seconds if no other operation is performed.

pop3-no-apop-USER@HOST, pop3-no-apop-HOST, pop3-no-apop

(Boolean)[Option] Unless this variable is set the ‘APOP’ authentication method will be used when connecting to a POP3 server that advertises support. The advantage of ‘APOP’ is that the password is not sent in clear text over the wire and that only a single packet is sent for the user/password tuple. Note that pop3-no-apop-HOST requires [v15-compat].

pop3-use-starttls-USER@HOST, pop3-use-starttls-HOST, pop3-use-starttls

(Boolean)[Option] Causes Mail to issue a ‘STLS’ command to make an unencrypted POP3 session TLS encrypted. This functionality is not supported by all servers, and is not used if the session is already encrypted by the POP3S method. Note that pop3-use-starttls-HOST requires [v15-compat].

posix

(Boolean) This flag enables POSIX mode, which changes behaviour of Mail where that deviates from standardized behaviour. It will be set implicitly before the Resource files are loaded if the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, and adjusting any of those two will be reflected by the other one implicitly. The following behaviour is covered and enforced by this mechanism:

• In non-interactive mode, any error encountered while loading resource files during program startup will cause a program exit, whereas in interactive mode such errors will stop loading of the currently loaded (stack of) file(s, i.e., recursively). These exits can be circumvented on a per-command base by using ignerr, one of the Command modifiers, for each command which shall be allowed to fail.
• alternates will replace the list of alternate addresses instead of appending to it. In addition alternates will only be honoured for any sort of message reply, and for aliases.
• The variable inserting COMMAND ESCAPES ~A, ~a, ~I and ~i will expand embedded character sequences ‘\t’ horizontal tabulator and ‘\n’ line feed. [v15 behaviour may differ] For compatibility reasons this step will always be performed.
• Upon changing the active file no summary of headers will be displayed even if header is set.
• Setting ignoreeof implies the behaviour described by dot.
• The variable keep is extended to cover any empty mailbox, not only empty primary system mailboxes: they will be removed when they are left in empty state otherwise.

print-alternatives

(Boolean) When a MIME message part of type ‘multipart/alternative’ is displayed and it contains a subpart of type ‘text/plain’, other parts are normally discarded. Setting this variable causes all subparts to be displayed, just as if the surrounding part was of type ‘multipart/mixed’.

prompt

The string used as a prompt in interactive mode. Whenever the variable is evaluated the value is treated as if specified within dollar-single-quotes (see Shell-style argument quoting). This (post-assignment, i.e., second) expansion can be used to embed status information, for example ?, !, account or mailbox-display.

In order to embed characters which should not be counted when calculating the visual width of the resulting string, enclose the characters of interest in a pair of reverse solidus escaped brackets: ‘\[\E[0m\]’; a slot for coloured prompts is also available with the [Option]al command colour. Prompting may be prevented by setting this to the null string (a.k.a. ‘set noprompt’).

prompt2

This string is used for secondary prompts, but is otherwise identical to prompt. The default is ‘.. ’.

quiet

(Boolean) Suppresses the printing of the version when first invoked.

quote

If set a reply message is started with the quoted original message, the lines of which are prefixed by the value of the variable indentprefix, taking into account quote-chars and quote-fold. If set to the empty value, the quoted message will be preceded and followed by the expansions of the values of quote-inject-head and quote-inject-tail, respectively. None of the headers of the quoted message is included in the quote if the value equals ‘noheading’, and only the headers selected by the ‘type’ headerpick selection are put above the message body for ‘headers’, whereas all headers and all MIME parts are included for ‘allheaders’. Also see quote-as-attachment and ~Q, one of the COMMAND ESCAPES.

quote-as-attachment

(Boolean) Add the original message in its entirety as a ‘message/rfc822’ MIME attachment when replying to a message. Note this works regardless of the setting of quote.

quote-chars

Can be set to a string consisting of non-whitespace ASCII characters which shall be treated as quotation leaders, the default being ‘>|}:’.

quote-fold

[Option] Can be set in addition to indentprefix, and creates a more fancy quotation in that leading quotation characters (quote-chars) are compressed and overlong lines are folded. quote-fold can be set to either one, two or three (space separated) numeric values, which are interpreted as the maximum (goal) and the minimum line length, respectively, in a spirit rather equal to the fmt(1) program, but line- instead of paragraph-based. The third value is used as the maximum line length instead of the first if no better break point can be found; it is ignored unless it is larger than the minimum and smaller than the maximum. If not set explicitly the minimum will reflect the goal algorithmically. The goal cannot be smaller than the length of indentprefix plus some additional pad; necessary adjustments take place silently.

quote-inject-head, quote-inject-tail

The strings to put before and after the text of a quoted message, respectively. The former defaults to ‘%f wrote:\n\n’. Special format directives will be expanded if possible, and if so configured the output will be folded according to quote-fold. Format specifiers in the given strings start with a percent sign ‘%’ and expand values of the original message, unless noted otherwise. Note that names and addresses are not subject to the setting of showto. Valid format specifiers are:

‘%%’

A plain percent sign.

‘%a’

The address(es) of the sender(s).

‘%d’

The date found in the ‘Date:’ header of the message when datefield is set (the default), otherwise the date when the message was received. Formatting can be controlled by assigning a strftime(3) format string to datefield (and datefield-markout-older).

‘%f’

The full name(s) (name and address, as given) of the sender(s).

‘%i’

The ‘Message-ID:’.

‘%n’

The real name(s) of the sender(s) if there is one and showname allows usage, the address(es) otherwise.

‘%r’

The senders real name(s) if there is one, the address(es) otherwise.

r-option-implicit

(Boolean) Setting this option evaluates the contents of from (or, if that contains multiple addresses, sender) and passes the results onto the used (file-based) MTA as described for the -r option (empty argument case).

recipients-in-cc

(Boolean) When doing a reply, the original ‘From:’ and ‘To:’ are by default merged into the new ‘To:’. If this variable is set, only the original ‘From:’ ends in the new ‘To:’, the rest is merged into ‘Cc:’.

record

Unless this variable is defined, no copies of outgoing mail will be saved. If defined it gives the pathname, subject to the usual Filename transformations, of a folder where all new, replied-to or forwarded messages are saved: when saving to this folder fails the message is not sent, but instead saved to DEAD. The standard defines that relative (fully expanded) paths are to be interpreted relative to the current directory (cwd), to force interpretation relative to folder outfolder needs to be set in addition.

record-files

(Boolean) If this variable is set the meaning of record will be extended to cover messages which target only file and pipe recipients (see expandaddr). These address types will not appear in recipient lists unless add-file-recipients is also set.

record-resent

(Boolean) If this variable is set the meaning of record will be extended to also cover the resend and Resend commands.

reply-in-same-charset

(Boolean) If this variable is set Mail first tries to use the same character set of the original message for replies. If this fails, the mechanism described in Character sets is evaluated as usual.

reply-strings

Can be set to a comma-separated list of (case-insensitive according to ASCII rules) strings which shall be recognized in addition to the built-in strings as ‘Subject:’ reply message indicators – built-in are ‘Re:’, which is mandated by RFC 5322, as well as the german ‘Aw:’, ‘Antw:’, and the ‘Wg:’ which often has been seen in the wild; I.e., the separating colon has to be specified explicitly.

reply-to

A list of addresses to put into the ‘Reply-To:’ field of the message header. Members of this list are handled as if they were in the alternates list.

replyto

[Obsolete] Variant of reply-to.

reply-to-honour

Controls whether a ‘Reply-To:’ header is honoured when replying to a message via reply or Lreply. This is a quadoption; if set without a value it defaults to “yes”.

rfc822-body-from_

(Boolean) This variable can be used to force displaying a so-called ‘From_’ line for messages that are embedded into an envelope mail via the ‘message/rfc822’ MIME mechanism, for more visual convenience.

save

(Boolean) Enable saving of (partial) messages in DEAD upon interrupt or delivery error.

screen

The number of lines that represents a “screenful” of lines, used in headers summary display, from searching, message topline display and scrolling via z. If this variable is not set Mail falls back to a calculation based upon the detected terminal window size and the baud rate: the faster the terminal, the more will be shown. Overall screen dimensions and pager usage is influenced by the environment variables COLUMNS and LINES and the variable crt.

searchheaders

(Boolean) Expand message-list specifiers in the form ‘/x:y’ to all messages containing the substring “y” in the header field ‘x’. The string search is case insensitive.

sendcharsets

[Option] A comma-separated list of character set names that can be used in outgoing internet mail. The value of the variable charset-8bit is automatically appended to this list of character sets. If no character set conversion capabilities are compiled into Mail then the only supported charset is ttycharset. Also see sendcharsets-else-ttycharset and refer to the section Character sets for the complete picture of character set conversion in Mail.

sendcharsets-else-ttycharset

(Boolean)[Option] If this variable is set, but sendcharsets is not, then Mail acts as if sendcharsets had been set to the value of the variable ttycharset. In effect this combination passes through the message data in the character set of the current locale encoding: therefore mail message text will be (assumed to be) in ISO-8859-1 encoding when send from within a ISO-8859-1 locale, and in UTF-8 encoding when send from within an UTF-8 locale.

The 8-bit fallback charset-8bit never comes into play as ttycharset is implicitly assumed to be 8-bit and capable to represent all files the user may specify (as is the case when no character set conversion support is available in Mail and the only supported character set is ttycharset: Character sets). This might be a problem for scripts which use the suggested ‘LC_ALL=C’ setting, since in this case the character set is US-ASCII by definition, so that it is better to also override ttycharset, then.

sender

An address that is put into the ‘Sender:’ field of outgoing messages, quoting RFC 5322: the mailbox of the agent responsible for the actual transmission of the message. This field should normally not be used unless the from field contains more than one address, on which case it is required. Dependent on the context this address is handled as if it were in the list of alternates. Also see -r, r-option-implicit.

sendmail

[Obsolete] Predecessor of mta.

sendmail-arguments

[Obsolete] Predecessor of mta-arguments.

sendmail-no-default-arguments

[Obsolete](Boolean) Predecessor of mta-no-default-arguments.

sendmail-progname

[Obsolete] Predecessor of mta-argv0.

sendwait

(Boolean) When sending a message wait until the mta (including the built-in SMTP one) exits before accepting further commands. Only with this variable set errors reported by the MTA will be recognizable! If the MTA returns a non-zero exit status, the exit status of Mail will also be non-zero.

showlast

(Boolean) This setting causes Mail to start at the last message instead of the first one when opening a mail folder, as well as with from and headers.

showname

(Boolean) Causes Mail to use the sender's real name instead of the plain address in the header field summary and in message specifications.

showto

(Boolean) Causes the recipient of the message to be shown in the header summary if the message was sent by the user.

Sign

The value backing ~A, one of the COMMAND ESCAPES. Also see message-inject-tail, on-compose-leave and on-compose-splice.

sign

The value backing ~a, one of the COMMAND ESCAPES. Also see message-inject-tail, on-compose-leave and on-compose-splice.

signature

[Obsolete] Please use on-compose-splice or on-compose-splice-shell or on-compose-leave and (if necessary) message-inject-tail instead!

skipemptybody

(Boolean) If an outgoing message does not contain any text in its first or only message part, do not send it but discard it silently (see also the command line option -E).

smime-ca-dir, smime-ca-file

[Option] Specify the location of trusted CA certificates in PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) for the purpose of verification of S/MIME signed messages. tls-ca-dir documents the necessary preparation steps to use the former. The set of CA certificates which are built into the TLS library can be explicitly turned off by setting smime-ca-no-defaults, and further fine-tuning is possible via smime-ca-flags.

smime-ca-flags

[Option] Can be used to fine-tune behaviour of the X509 CA certificate storage, and the certificate verification that is used. The actual values and their meanings are documented for tls-ca-flags.

smime-ca-no-defaults

(Boolean)[Option] Do not load the default CA locations that are built into the used to TLS library to verify S/MIME signed messages.

smime-cipher-USER@HOST, smime-cipher

[Option] Specifies the cipher to use when generating S/MIME encrypted messages (for the specified account). RFC 5751 mandates a default of ‘aes128’ (AES-128 CBC). Possible values are (case-insensitive and) in decreasing cipher strength: ‘aes256’ (AES-256 CBC), ‘aes192’ (AES-192 CBC), ‘aes128’ (AES-128 CBC), ‘des3’ (DES EDE3 CBC, 168 bits; default if ‘aes128’ is not available) and ‘des’ (DES CBC, 56 bits).

The actually available cipher algorithms depend on the cryptographic library that Mail uses. [Option] Support for more cipher algorithms may be available through dynamic loading via, e.g., EVP_get_cipherbyname(3) (OpenSSL) if Mail has been compiled to support this.

smime-crl-dir

[Option] Specifies a directory that contains files with CRLs in PEM format to use when verifying S/MIME messages.

smime-crl-file

[Option] Specifies a file that contains a CRL in PEM format to use when verifying S/MIME messages.

smime-encrypt-USER@HOST

[Option] If this variable is set, messages send to the given receiver are encrypted before sending. The value of the variable must be set to the name of a file that contains a certificate in PEM format.

If a message is sent to multiple recipients, each of them for whom a corresponding variable is set will receive an individually encrypted message; other recipients will continue to receive the message in plain text unless the smime-force-encryption variable is set. It is recommended to sign encrypted messages, i.e., to also set the smime-sign variable.

smime-force-encryption

(Boolean)[Option] Causes Mail to refuse sending unencrypted messages.

smime-sign

(Boolean)[Option] S/MIME sign outgoing messages with the user's private key and include the user's certificate as a MIME attachment. Signing a message enables a recipient to verify that the sender used a valid certificate, that the email addresses in the certificate match those in the message header and that the message content has not been altered. It does not change the message text, and people will be able to read the message as usual. Also see smime-sign-cert, smime-sign-include-certs and smime-sign-digest.

smime-sign-cert-USER@HOST, smime-sign-cert

[Option] Points to a file in PEM format. For the purpose of signing and decryption this file needs to contain the user's private key, followed by his certificate.

For message signing ‘USER@HOST’ is always derived from the value of from (or, if that contains multiple addresses, sender). For the purpose of encryption the recipient's public encryption key (certificate) is expected; the command certsave can be used to save certificates of signed messages (the section Signed and encrypted messages with S/MIME gives some details). This mode of operation is usually driven by the specialized form.

When decrypting messages the account is derived from the recipient fields (‘To:’ and ‘Cc:’) of the message, which are searched for addresses for which such a variable is set. Mail always uses the first address that matches, so if the same message is sent to more than one of the user's addresses using different encryption keys, decryption might fail.

For signing and decryption purposes it is possible to use encrypted keys, and the pseudo-host(s) ‘USER@HOST.smime-cert-key’ for the private key (and ‘USER@HOST.smime-cert-cert’ for the certificate stored in the same file) will be used for performing any necessary password lookup, therefore the lookup can be automated via the mechanisms described in On URL syntax and credential lookup. For example, the hypothetical address ‘bob@exam.ple’ could be driven with a private key / certificate pair path defined in smime-sign-cert-bob@exam.ple, and needed passwords would then be looked up via the pseudo hosts ‘bob@exam.ple.smime-cert-key’ (and ‘bob@exam.ple.smime-cert-cert’). To include intermediate certificates, use smime-sign-include-certs.

smime-sign-digest-USER@HOST, smime-sign-digest

[Option] Specifies the message digestto use when signing S/MIME messages. Please remember that for this use case ‘USER@HOST’ refers to the variable from (or, if that contains multiple addresses, sender). The available algorithms depend on the used cryptographic library, but at least one usable builtin algorithm is ensured as a default. If possible the standard RFC 5751 will be violated by using ‘SHA512’ instead of the mandated ‘SHA1’ due to security concerns.

Mail will try to add built-in support for the following message digests, names are case-insensitive: ‘BLAKE2b512’, ‘BLAKE2s256’, ‘SHA3-512’, ‘SHA3-384’, ‘SHA3-256’, ‘SHA3-224’, as well as the widely available ‘SHA512’, ‘SHA384’, ‘SHA256’, ‘SHA224’, and the proposed insecure ‘SHA1’ and ‘MD5’. More digests may [Option]ally be available through dynamic loading via, e.g., the OpenSSL function EVP_get_digestbyname(3).

smime-sign-include-certs-USER@HOST, smime-sign-include-certs

[Option] If used, this is supposed to a consist of a comma-separated list of files, each of which containing a single certificate in PEM format to be included in the S/MIME message in addition to the smime-sign-cert certificate. This can be used to include intermediate certificates of the certificate authority, in order to allow the receiver's S/MIME implementation to perform a verification of the entire certificate chain, starting from a local root certificate, over the intermediate certificates, down to the smime-sign-cert. Even though top level certificates may also be included in the chain, they won't be used for the verification on the receiver's side.

For the purpose of the mechanisms involved here, ‘USER@HOST’ refers to the content of the internal variable from (or, if that contains multiple addresses, sender). The pseudo-host ‘USER@HOST.smime-include-certs’ will be used for performing password lookups for these certificates, shall they have been given one, therefore the lookup can be automated via the mechanisms described in On URL syntax and credential lookup.

smime-sign-message-digest-USER@HOST, smime-sign-message-digest

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessor(s) of smime-sign-digest.

smtp

[Obsolete][Option] To use the built-in SMTP transport, specify a SMTP URL in mta. [v15 behaviour may differ] For compatibility reasons a set smtp is used in preference of mta.

smtp-auth-USER@HOST, smtp-auth-HOST, smtp-auth

[Option] Variable chain that controls the SMTP mta authentication method, possible values are ‘none’ ([no v15-compat] default), ‘plain’ ([v15-compat] default), ‘login’ as well as the [Option]al methods ‘cram-md5’ and ‘gssapi’. The ‘none’ method does not need any user credentials, ‘gssapi’ requires a user name and all other methods require a user name and a password. See [v15-compat] mta, user and password ([no v15-compat] smtp-auth-password and smtp-auth-user). Note that smtp-auth-HOST is [v15-compat]. [no v15-compat]: Note for smtp-auth-USER@HOST: may override dependent on sender address in the variable from.

smtp-auth-password

[Option][no v15-compat] Sets the global fallback password for SMTP authentication. If the authentication method requires a password, but neither smtp-auth-password nor a matching smtp-auth-password-USER@HOST can be found, Mail will ask for a password on the user's terminal.

smtp-auth-password-USER@HOST

[no v15-compat] Overrides smtp-auth-password for specific values of sender addresses, dependent upon the variable from.

smtp-auth-user

[Option][no v15-compat] Sets the global fallback user name for SMTP authentication. If the authentication method requires a user name, but neither smtp-auth-user nor a matching smtp-auth-user-USER@HOST can be found, Mail will ask for a user name on the user's terminal.

smtp-auth-user-USER@HOST

[no v15-compat] Overrides smtp-auth-user for specific values of sender addresses, dependent upon the variable from.

smtp-hostname

[Option][v15-compat] Normally Mail uses the variable from to derive the necessary ‘USER@HOST’ information in order to issue a ‘MAIL FROM:<>’ SMTP mta command. Setting smtp-hostname can be used to use the ‘USER’ from the SMTP account (mta or the user variable chain) and the ‘HOST’ from the content of this variable (or, if that is the empty string, hostname or the local hostname as a last resort). This often allows using an address that is itself valid but hosted by a provider other than which (in from) is about to send the message. Setting this variable also influences generated ‘Message-ID:’ and ‘Content-ID:’ header fields. If the [Option]al IDNA support is available (see idna-disable) variable assignment is aborted when a necessary conversion fails.

smtp-use-starttls-USER@HOST, smtp-use-starttls-HOST, smtp-use-starttls

(Boolean)[Option] Causes Mail to issue a ‘STARTTLS’ command to make an SMTP mta session TLS encrypted, i.e., to enable transport layer security.

socks-proxy-USER@HOST, socks-proxy-HOST, socks-proxy

[Option] If this is set to the hostname (SOCKS URL) of a SOCKS5 server then Mail will proxy all of its network activities through it. This can be used to proxy SMTP, POP3 etc. network traffic through the Tor anonymizer, for example. The following would create a local SOCKS proxy on port 10000 that forwards to the machine ‘HOST’, and from which the network traffic is actually instantiated:

# Create local proxy server in terminal 1 forwarding to HOST 
$ ssh -D 10000 USER@HOST 
# Then, start a client that uses it in terminal 2 
$ mail -Ssocks-proxy-USER@HOST=localhost:10000
    

spam-interface

[Option] In order to use any of the spam-related commands (like, e.g., spamrate) the desired spam interface must be defined by setting this variable. Please refer to the manual section Handling spam for the complete picture of spam handling in Mail. All or none of the following interfaces may be available:

‘spamc’

Interaction with spamc(1) from the spamassassin(1) (SpamAssassin) suite. Different to the generic filter interface Mail will automatically add the correct arguments for a given command and has the necessary knowledge to parse the program's output. A default value for spamc-command will have been compiled into the Mail binary if spamc(1) has been found in PATH during compilation. Shall it be necessary to define a specific connection type (rather than using a configuration file for that), the variable spamc-arguments can be used as in, e.g., ‘-d server.example.com -p 783’. It is also possible to specify a per-user configuration via spamc-user. Note that this interface does not inspect the ‘is-spam’ flag of a message for the command spamforget.

‘filter’

generic spam filter support via freely configurable hooks. This interface is meant for programs like bogofilter(1) and requires according behaviour in respect to the hooks' exit status for at least the command spamrate (‘0’ meaning a message is spam, ‘1’ for non-spam, ‘2’ for unsure and any other return value indicating a hard error); since the hooks can include shell code snippets diverting behaviour can be intercepted as necessary. The hooks are spamfilter-ham, spamfilter-noham, spamfilter-nospam, spamfilter-rate and spamfilter-spam; the manual section Handling spam contains examples for some programs. The process environment of the hooks will have the variable MAILX_FILENAME_GENERATED set. Note that spam score support for spamrate is not supported unless the [Option]tional regular expression support is available and the spamfilter-rate-scanscore variable is set.

spam-maxsize

[Option] Messages that exceed this size will not be passed through to the configured spam-interface. If unset or 0, the default of 420000 bytes is used.

spamc-command

[Option] The path to the spamc(1) program for the ‘spamc’ spam-interface. Note that the path is not expanded, but used “as is”. A fallback path will have been compiled into the Mail binary if the executable had been found during compilation.

spamc-arguments

[Option] Even though Mail deals with most arguments for the ‘spamc’ spam-interface automatically, it may at least sometimes be desirable to specify connection-related ones via this variable, e.g., ‘-d server.example.com -p 783’.

spamc-user

[Option] Specify a username for per-user configuration files for the ‘spamc’ spam-interface. If this is set to the empty string then Mail will use the name of the current user.

spamfilter-ham, spamfilter-noham, spamfilter-nospam, spamfilter-rate, spamfilter-spam

[Option] Command and argument hooks for the ‘filter’ spam-interface. The manual section Handling spam contains examples for some programs.

spamfilter-rate-scanscore

[Option] Because of the generic nature of the ‘filter’ spam-interface spam scores are not supported for it by default, but if the [Option]nal regular expression support is available then setting this variable can be used to overcome this restriction. It is interpreted as follows: first a number (digits) is parsed that must be followed by a semicolon ‘;’ and an extended regular expression. Then the latter is used to parse the first output line of the spamfilter-rate hook, and, in case the evaluation is successful, the group that has been specified via the number is interpreted as a floating point scan score.

ssl-ca-dir-USER@HOST, ssl-ca-dir-HOST, ssl-ca-dir, ssl-ca-file-USER@HOST, ssl-ca-file-HOST, ssl-ca-file

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessors of tls-ca-file, tls-ca-dir.

ssl-ca-flags-USER@HOST, ssl-ca-flags-HOST, ssl-ca-flags

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessor of tls-ca-flags.

ssl-ca-no-defaults-USER@HOST, ssl-ca-no-defaults-HOST, ssl-ca-no-defaults

[Obsolete](Boolean)[Option] Predecessor of tls-ca-no-defaults.

ssl-cert-USER@HOST, ssl-cert-HOST, ssl-cert

[Obsolete][Option] Please use the Certificate slot of tls-config-pairs.

ssl-cipher-list-USER@HOST, ssl-cipher-list-HOST, ssl-cipher-list

[Obsolete][Option] Please use the CipherString slot of tls-config-pairs.

ssl-config-file

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessor of tls-config-file.

ssl-config-module-USER@HOST, ssl-config-module-HOST, ssl-config-module

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessor of tls-config-module.

ssl-config-pairs-USER@HOST, ssl-config-pairs-HOST, ssl-config-pairs

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessor of tls-config-pairs.

ssl-crl-dir, ssl-crl-file

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessors of tls-crl-dir, tls-crl-file.

ssl-curves-USER@HOST, ssl-curves-HOST, ssl-curves

[Obsolete][Option] Please use the Curves slot of tls-config-pairs.

ssl-features

[Obsolete][Option](Read-only) Predecessor of tls-features.

ssl-key-USER@HOST, ssl-key-HOST, ssl-key

[Obsolete][Option] Please use the PrivateKey slot of tls-config-pairs.

ssl-method-USER@HOST, ssl-method-HOST, ssl-method

[Obsolete][Option] Please use the Protocol slot of tls-config-pairs.

ssl-protocol-USER@HOST, ssl-protocol-HOST, ssl-protocol

[Obsolete][Option] Please use the Protocol slot of tls-config-pairs.

ssl-rand-file

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessor of tls-rand-file.

ssl-verify-USER@HOST, ssl-verify-HOST, ssl-verify

[Obsolete][Option] Predecessor of tls-verify.

stealthmua

If only set without an assigned value, then this setting inhibits the generation of the ‘Message-ID:’, ‘Content-ID:’ and ‘User-Agent:’ header fields that include obvious references to Mail. There are two pitfalls associated with this: First, the message id of outgoing messages is not known anymore. Second, an expert may still use the remaining information in the header to track down the originating mail user agent. If set to the value ‘noagent’, then the mentioned ‘Message-ID:’ and ‘Content-ID:’ suppression does not occur.

system-mailrc

(Read-only) The compiled in path of the system wide initialization file one of the Resource files: /etc/mail.rc.

termcap

([Option]) This specifies a comma-separated list of Terminal Information Library (libterminfo, -lterminfo) and/or Termcap Access Library (libtermcap, -ltermcap) capabilities (see On terminal control and line editor, escape commas with reverse solidus) to be used to overwrite or define entries. Note this variable will only be queried once at program startup and can thus only be specified in resource files or on the command line.

String capabilities form ‘cap=value’ pairs and are expected unless noted otherwise. Numerics have to be notated as ‘cap#number’ where the number is expected in normal decimal notation. Finally, booleans do not have any value but indicate a true or false state simply by being defined or not; this indeed means that Mail does not support undefining an existing boolean. String capability values will undergo some expansions before use: for one notations like ‘^LETTER’ stand for ‘control-LETTER’, and for clarification purposes ‘\E’ can be used to specify ‘escape’ (the control notation ‘^[’ could lead to misreadings when a left bracket follows, which it does for the standard CSI sequence); finally three letter octal sequences, as in ‘\061’, are supported. To specify that a terminal supports 256-colours, and to define sequences that home the cursor and produce an audible bell, one might write:

? set termcap='Co#256,home=\E[H,bel=^G'
    

The following terminal capabilities are or may be meaningful for the operation of the built-in line editor or Mail in general:

colors or Co

max_colors: numeric capability specifying the maximum number of colours. Note that Mail does not actually care about the terminal beside that, but always emits ANSI / ISO 6429 escape sequences.

rmcup or te / smcup or ti

exit_ca_mode and enter_ca_mode, respectively: exit and enter the alternative screen ca-mode, effectively turning Mail into a fullscreen application. This must be enabled explicitly by setting termcap-ca-mode.

smkx or ks / rmkx or ke

keypad_xmit and keypad_local, respectively: enable and disable the keypad. This is always enabled if available, because it seems even keyboards without keypads generate other key codes for, e.g., cursor keys in that case, and only if enabled we see the codes that we are interested in.

ed or cd

clr_eos: clear the screen.

clear or cl

clear_screen: clear the screen and home cursor. (Will be simulated via ho plus cd.)

home or ho

cursor_home: home cursor.

el or ce

clr_eol: clear to the end of line. (Will be simulated via ch plus repetitions of space characters.)

hpa or ch

column_address: move the cursor (to the given column parameter) in the current row. (Will be simulated via cr plus nd.)

cr

carriage_return: move to the first column in the current row. The default built-in fallback is ‘\r’.

cub1 or le

cursor_left: move the cursor left one space (non-destructively). The default built-in fallback is ‘\b’.

cuf1 or nd

cursor_right: move the cursor right one space (non-destructively). The default built-in fallback is ‘\E[C’, which is used by most terminals. Less often occur ‘\EC’ and ‘\EOC’.

Many more capabilities which describe key-sequences are documented for bind.

termcap-ca-mode

[Option] Allow usage of the exit_ca_mode and enter_ca_mode terminal capabilities, see termcap. Note this variable will only be queried once at program startup and can thus only be specified in resource files or on the command line.

termcap-disable

[Option] Disable any interaction with a terminal control library. If set only some generic fallback built-ins and possibly the content of termcap describe the terminal to Mail. Note this variable will only be queried once at program startup and can thus only be specified in resource files or on the command line.

tls-ca-dir-USER@HOST, tls-ca-dir-HOST, tls-ca-dir, tls-ca-file-USER@HOST, tls-ca-file-HOST, tls-ca-file

[Option] Directory and file, respectively, for pools of trusted CA certificates in PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) format, for the purpose of verification of TLS server certificates. Concurrent use is possible, the file is loaded once needed first, the directory lookup is performed anew as a last resort whenever necessary. The CA certificate pool built into the TLS library can be disabled via tls-ca-no-defaults, further fine-tuning is possible via tls-ca-flags. Note the directory search variant requires the certificate files to adhere special filename conventions, please see SSL_CTX_load_verify_locations(3) and verify(1) (or c_rehash(1)).

tls-ca-flags-USER@HOST, tls-ca-flags-HOST, tls-ca-flags

[Option] Can be used to fine-tune behaviour of the X509 CA certificate storage, and the certificate verification that is used (also see tls-verify). The value is expected to consist of a comma-separated list of configuration directives, with any intervening whitespace being ignored. The directives directly map to flags that can be passed to X509_STORE_set_flags(3), which are usually defined in a file openssl/x509_vfy.h, and the availability of which depends on the used TLS library version: a directive without mapping is ignored (error log subject to debug). Directives currently understood (case-insensitively) include:

no-alt-chains

If the initial chain is not trusted, do not attempt to build an alternative chain. Setting this flag will make OpenSSL certificate verification match that of older OpenSSL versions, before automatic building and checking of alternative chains has been implemented; also see trusted-first.

no-check-time

Do not check certificate/CRL validity against current time.

partial-chain

By default partial, incomplete chains which cannot be verified up to the chain top, a self-signed root certificate, will not verify. With this flag set, a chain succeeds to verify if at least one signing certificate of the chain is in any of the configured trusted stores of CA certificates. The OpenSSL manual page SSL_CTX_load_verify_locations(3) gives some advise how to manage your own trusted store of CA certificates.

strict

Disable workarounds for broken certificates.

trusted-first

Try building a chain using issuers in the trusted store first to avoid problems with server-sent legacy intermediate certificates. Newer versions of OpenSSL support alternative chain checking and enable it by default, resulting in the same behaviour; also see no-alt-chains.

tls-ca-no-defaults-USER@HOST, tls-ca-no-defaults-HOST, tls-ca-no-defaults

(Boolean)[Option] Do not load the default CA locations that are built into the used to TLS library to verify TLS server certificates.

tls-config-file

[Option] If this variable is set CONF_modules_load_file(3) (if announced via ‘+modules-load-file’ in tls-features) is used to allow resource file based configuration of the TLS library. This happens once the library is used first, which may also be early during startup (logged with verbose)! If a non-empty value is given then the given file, after performing Filename transformations, will be used instead of the TLS libraries global default, and it is an error if the file cannot be loaded. The application name will always be passed as ‘mail’. Some TLS libraries support application-specific configuration via resource files loaded like this, please see tls-config-module.

tls-config-module-USER@HOST, tls-config-module-HOST, tls-config-module

[Option] If file based application-specific configuration via tls-config-file is available, announced as ‘+ctx-config’ by tls-features, indicating availability of SSL_CTX_config(3), then, it becomes possible to use a central TLS configuration file for all programs, including mail, e.g.:

# Register a configuration section for mail 
mail = mailx_master 
# The top configuration section creates a relation 
# in between dynamic SSL configuration and an actual 
# program specific configuration section 
[mailx_master] 
ssl_conf = mailx_tls_config 
# Well that actual program specific configuration section 
# now can map individual tls-config-module names to sections, 
# e.g., tls-config-module=account_xy 
[mailx_tls_config] 
account_xy = mailx_account_xy 
account_yz = mailx_account_yz 
[mailx_account_xy] 
MinProtocol = TLSv1.2 
Curves=P-521 
[mailx_account_yz] 
CipherString = TLSv1.2:!aNULL:!eNULL: 
MinProtocol = TLSv1.1 
Options = Bugs
    

tls-config-pairs-USER@HOST, tls-config-pairs-HOST, tls-config-pairs

[Option] The value of this variable chain will be interpreted as a comma-separated list of directive/value pairs. Directives and values need to be separated by equals signs ‘=’, any whitespace surrounding pair members is removed. Keys are (usually) case-insensitive. Different to when placing these pairs in a tls-config-module section of a tls-config-file, commas ‘,’ need to be escaped with a reverse solidus ‘\’ when included in pairs; also different: if the equals sign ‘=’ is preceded with an asterisk ‘*’ Filename transformations will be performed on the value; it is an error if these fail. Unless proper support is announced by tls-features (‘+conf-ctx’) only the keys below are supported, otherwise the pairs will be used directly as arguments to the function SSL_CONF_cmd(3).

Certificate

Filename of a TLS client certificate (chain) required by some servers. Fallback support via SSL_CTX_use_certificate_chain_file(3). Filename transformations are performed. Note: if you use this you need to specify the private key via PrivateKey, tls-key will not be used!

CipherString

A list of ciphers for TLS connections, see ciphers(1). By default no list of ciphers is set, resulting in a Protocol-specific list of ciphers (the protocol standards define lists of acceptable ciphers; possibly cramped by the used TLS library). Fallback support via SSL_CTX_set_cipher_list(3).

Ciphersuites

A list of ciphers used for TLSv1.3 connections, see ciphers(1). These will be joined onto the list of ciphers from CipherString. Available if tls-features announces ‘+ctx-set-ciphersuites’, as necessary via SSL_CTX_set_ciphersuites(3).

Curves

A list of supported elliptic curves, if applicable. By default no curves are set. Fallback support via SSL_CTX_set1_curves_list(3), if available.

MaxProtocol, MinProtocol

The maximum and minimum supported TLS versions, respectively. Available if tls-features announces ‘+ctx-set-maxmin-proto’, as necessary via SSL_CTX_set_max_proto_version(3) and SSL_CTX_set_min_proto_version(3); these fallbacks use an internal parser which understands the strings ‘SSLv3’, ‘TLSv1’, ‘TLSv1.1’, ‘TLSv1.2’, ‘TLSv1.3’, and the special value ‘None’, which disables the given limit.

Options

Various flags to set. Fallback via SSL_CTX_set_options(3), in which case any other value but (exactly) ‘Bugs’ results in an error.

PrivateKey

Filename of the private key in PEM format of a TLS client certificate. If unset, the name of the certificate file is used. Filename transformations are performed. Fallback via SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey_file(3). Note: if you use this you need to specify the certificate (chain) via Certificate, tls-cert will not be used!

Protocol

The used TLS protocol. If tls-features announces ‘+conf-ctx’ or ‘ctx-set-maxmin-proto’ then using MaxProtocol and MinProtocol is preferable. Fallback is SSL_CTX_set_options(3), driven via an internal parser which understands the strings ‘SSLv3’, ‘TLSv1’, ‘TLSv1.1’, ‘TLSv1.2’, ‘TLSv1.3’, and the special value ‘ALL’. Multiple protocols may be given as a comma-separated list, any whitespace is ignored, an optional plus sign ‘+’ prefix enables, a hyphen-minus ‘-’ prefix disables a protocol, so that ‘-ALL, TLSv1.2’ enables only the TLSv1.2 protocol.

tls-crl-dir, tls-crl-file

[Option] Specify a directory / a file, respectively, that contains a CRL in PEM format to use when verifying TLS server certificates.

tls-features

[Option](Read-only) This expands to a comma separated list of the TLS library identity and optional SSL library features. Currently supported identities are ‘libressl’ (LibreSSL) , ‘libssl-0x10100’ (OpenSSL v1.1.x series) and ‘libssl-0x10000’ (elder OpenSSL series, other clones). Optional features are preceded with a plus sign ‘+’ when available, and with a hyphen-minus ‘-’ otherwise.

Currently known features are ‘modules-load-file’ (tls-config-file), ‘conf-ctx’ (tls-config-pairs), ‘ctx-config’ (tls-config-module), ‘ctx-set-maxmin-proto’ (tls-config-pairs), ‘ctx-set-ciphersuites’ (the Ciphersuites slot of tls-config-pairs).

tls-fingerprint-USER@HOST, tls-fingerprint-HOST, tls-fingerprint

[Option] It is possible to replace the verification of the connection peer certificate against the entire local pool of CAs (for more see Encrypted network communication) with the comparison against a precalculated certificate message digest, the so-called fingerprint, to be specified as the used tls-fingerprint-digest. This fingerprint can be calculated with, e.g., ‘tls fingerprint HOST’.

tls-fingerprint-digest-USER@HOST, tls-fingerprint-digest-HOST, tls-fingerprint-digest

[Option] The message digest to be used when creating TLS certificate fingerprints, the defaults, if available, in test order, being ‘BLAKE2s256’, ‘SHA256’. For the complete list of digest algorithms refer to smime-sign-digest.

tls-rand-file

[Option] Gives the filename to a file with random entropy data, see RAND_load_file(3). If this variable is not set, or set to the empty string, or if the Filename transformations fail, then RAND_file_name(3) will be used to create the filename. If the SSL PRNG was seeded successfully The file will be updated (RAND_write_file(3)) if and only if seeding and buffer stirring succeeds.

tls-verify-USER@HOST, tls-verify-HOST, tls-verify

[Option] Variable chain that sets the action to be performed if an error occurs during TLS server certificate validation against the specified or default trust stores tls-ca-dir, tls-ca-file, or the TLS library built-in defaults (unless usage disallowed via tls-ca-no-defaults), and as fine-tuned via tls-ca-flags. Valid (case-insensitive) values are ‘strict’ (fail and close connection immediately), ‘ask’ (ask whether to continue on standard input), ‘warn’ (show a warning and continue), ‘ignore’ (do not perform validation). The default is ‘ask’.

toplines

If defined, gives the number of lines of a message to be displayed with the command top; if unset, the first five lines are printed, if set to 0 the variable screen is inspected. If the value is negative then its absolute value will be used for unsigned right shifting (see vexpr) the screen height.

topsqueeze

(Boolean) If set then the top command series will strip adjacent empty lines and quotations.

ttycharset

The character set of the terminal Mail operates on, and the one and only supported character set that Mail can use if no character set conversion capabilities have been compiled into it, in which case it defaults to ISO-8859-1. Otherwise it defaults to UTF-8. Sufficient locale support provided the default will be preferably deduced from the locale environment if that is set (e.g., LC_CTYPE, see there for more); runtime locale changes will be reflected by ttycharset except during the program startup phase and if -S had been used to freeze the given value. Refer to the section Character sets for the complete picture about character sets.

typescript-mode

(Boolean) A special multiplex variable that disables all variables and settings which result in behaviour that interferes with running Mail in script(1), e.g., it sets colour-disable, line-editor-disable and (before startup completed only) termcap-disable. Unsetting it does not restore the former state of the covered settings.

umask

For a safe-by-default policy the process file mode creation mask umask(2) will be set to ‘0077’ on program startup by default. Child processes inherit the file mode creation mask of their parent, and by setting this variable to an empty value no change will be applied, and the inherited value will be used. Otherwise the given value will be made the new file mode creation mask.

user-HOST, user

[v15-compat] Variable chain that sets a global fallback user name, which is used in case none has been given in the protocol and account-specific URL. This variable defaults to the name of the user who runs Mail.

v15-compat

(Boolean) Setting this enables upward compatibility with Mail version 15.0 in respect to which configuration options are available and how they are handled. This manual uses [v15-compat] and [no v15-compat] to refer to the new and the old way of doing things, respectively.

verbose

(Boolean) This setting, also controllable via the command line option -v, causes Mail to be more verbose, e.g., it will display obsoletion warnings and TLS certificate chains. Even though marked (Boolean) this option may be set twice in order to increase the level of verbosity even more, in which case even details of the actual message delivery and protocol conversations are shown. A single noverbose is sufficient to disable verbosity as such.

version, version-date, version-hexnum, version-major, version-minor, version-update

(Read-only) Mail version information: the first variable is a string with the complete version identification, the second the release date in ISO 8601 notation without time. The third is a 32-bit hexadecimal number with the upper 8 bits storing the major, followed by the minor and update version numbers which occupy 12 bits each. The latter three variables contain only decimal digits: the major, minor and update version numbers. The output of the command version will include this information.

writebackedited

If this variable is set messages modified using the edit or visual commands are written back to the current folder when it is quit; it is only honoured for writable folders in MBOX format, though. Note that the editor will be pointed to the raw message content in that case, i.e., neither MIME decoding nor decryption will have been performed, and proper RFC 4155 ‘From_’ quoting of newly added or edited content is also left as an exercise to the user.

ENVIRONMENT

$ EDITOR="vim -u ${HOME}/.vimrc" 
$ export EDITOR 
$ COLUMNS=80 mail -R

COLUMNS

The user's preferred width in column positions for the terminal screen or window. Queried and used once on program startup, actively managed for child processes and the MLE (see On terminal control and line editor) in interactive mode thereafter. Ignored in non-interactive mode, which always uses 80 columns, unless in -# batch mode.

DEAD

The name of the (mailbox) file to use for saving aborted messages if save is set; this defaults to ~/dead.letter. If the variable debug is set no output will be generated, otherwise the contents of the file will be replaced.

EDITOR

Pathname of the text editor to use for the edit command and ~e (see COMMAND ESCAPES); VISUAL is used for a more display oriented editor.

HOME

The user's home directory. This variable is only used when it resides in the process environment. The calling user's home directory will be used instead if this directory does not exist, is not accessible or cannot be read; it will always be used for the root user. (No test for being writable is performed to allow usage by non-privileged users within read-only jails, but dependent on the variable settings this directory is a default write target, e.g. for DEAD, MBOX and more.)

LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG

[Option] The (names in lookup order of the) locale(7) (and / or see setlocale(3)) which indicates the used Character sets. Runtime changes trigger automatic updates of the entire locale system, which includes updating ttycharset (except during startup if the variable has been frozen via -S).

LINES

The user's preferred number of lines on a page or the vertical screen or window size in lines. Queried and used once on program startup, actively managed for child processes in interactive mode thereafter. Ignored in non-interactive mode, which always uses 24 lines, unless in batch mode.

LISTER

Pathname of the directory lister to use in the folders command when operating on local mailboxes. Default is ls(1) (path search through SHELL).

LOGNAME

Upon startup Mail will actively ensure that this variable refers to the name of the user who runs Mail, in order to be able to pass a verified name to any newly created child process.

MAIL

Is used as the user's primary system mailbox unless inbox is set. This is assumed to be an absolute pathname. If this environmental fallback is also not set, a built-in compile-time default is used.

MAILCAPS

[Option] Overrides the default path search for The Mailcap files, which is defined in the standard RFC 1524 as ‘~/.mailcap:/etc/mailcap:/usr/etc/mailcap:/usr/local/etc/mailcap’. (Mail makes it a configuration option, however.) Note this is not a search path, but a path search.

MAILRC

Is used as a startup file instead of ~/.mailrc if set. In order to avoid side-effects from configuration files scripts should either set this variable to /dev/null or the -: command line option should be used.

MAILX_NO_SYSTEM_RC

If this variable is set then reading of /etc/mail.rc (a.k.a. system-mailrc) at startup is inhibited, i.e., the same effect is achieved as if Mail had been started up with the option -: (and according argument) or -n. This variable is only used when it resides in the process environment.

MBOX

The name of the user's secondary mailbox file. A logical subset of the special Filename transformations (also see file) are supported. The default is ~/mbox. Traditionally this MBOX is used as the file to save messages from the primary system mailbox that have been read. Also see Message states.

NETRC

[v15-compat][Option] This variable overrides the default location of the user's ~/.netrc file.

PAGER

Pathname of the program to use for backing the command more, and when the crt variable enforces usage of a pager for output. The default paginator is more(1) (path search through SHELL).

Mail inspects the contents of this variable: if its contains the string “less” then a non-existing environment variable LESS will be set to ‘Ri’, likewise for “lv” LV will optionally be set to ‘-c’. Alse see colour-pager.

PATH

A colon-separated list of directories that is searched by the shell when looking for commands, e.g., ‘/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin’.

POSIXLY_CORRECT

This variable is automatically looked for upon startup, see posix for more.

SHELL

The shell to use for the commands !, shell, the ~! COMMAND ESCAPES and when starting subprocesses. A default shell is used if this environment variable is not defined.

SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH

Specifies a time in seconds since the Unix epoch (1970-01-01) to be used in place of the current time. This variable is looked up upon program startup, and its existence will switch Mail to a reproducible mode (https://reproducible-builds.org) which uses deterministic random numbers, a special fixated pseudo LOGNAME and more. This operation mode is used for development and by software packagers. [v15 behaviour may differ] Currently an invalid setting is only ignored, rather than causing a program abortion.

$ SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=`date +%s` mail

TERM

[Option] The terminal type for which output is to be prepared. For extended colour and font control please refer to Coloured display, and for terminal management in general to On terminal control and line editor.

TMPDIR

Except for the root user this variable defines the directory for temporary files to be used instead of /tmp (or the given compile-time constant) if set, existent, accessible as well as read- and writable. This variable is only used when it resides in the process environment, but Mail will ensure at startup that this environment variable is updated to contain a usable temporary directory.

USER

Identical to LOGNAME (see there), but this variable is not standardized, should therefore not be used, and is only corrected if already set.

VISUAL

Pathname of the text editor to use for the visual command and ~v (see COMMAND ESCAPES); EDITOR is used for a less display oriented editor.

FILES

~/.mailrc

User-specific file giving initial commands, one of the Resource files. The actual value is read from MAILRC.

/etc/mail.rc

System wide initialization file, one of the Resource files. The actual value is read from system-mailrc.

~/.mailcap

[Option] Personal MIME type handler definition file, see The Mailcap files. This location is part of the RFC 1524 standard search path, which is a configuration option and can be overridden via MAILCAPS.

/etc/mailcap

[Option] System wide MIME type handler definition file, see The Mailcap files. This location is part of the RFC 1524 standard search path, which is a configuration option and can be overridden via

~/mbox

The default value for MBOX.

~/.mime.types

Personal MIME types, see The mime.types files.

/etc/mime.types

System wide MIME types, see The mime.types files.

~/.netrc

[v15-compat][Option] The default location of the user's .netrc file – the section The .netrc file documents the file format. The actually used path can be overridden via NETRC.

/dev/null

The data sink null(4).

Resource files

/etc/mail.rc

System wide initialization file (system-mailrc). Reading of this file can be suppressed, either by using the -: (and according argument) or -n command line options, or by setting the ENVIRONMENT variable MAILX_NO_SYSTEM_RC.

~/.mailrc

File giving initial commands. A different file can be chosen by setting the ENVIRONMENT variable MAILRC. Reading of this file can be suppressed with the -: command line option.

mailx-extra-rc

Defines a startup file to be read after all other resource files. It can be used to specify settings that are not understood by other mailx(1) implementations, for example. This variable is only honoured when defined in a resource file, e.g., it is one of the INTERNAL VARIABLES.

• The whitespace characters space, tabulator and newline, as well as those defined by the variable ifs, are removed from the beginning and end of input lines.
• Empty lines are ignored.
• Any other line is interpreted as a command. It may be spread over multiple input lines if the newline character is “escaped” by placing a reverse solidus character ‘\’ as the last character of the line; whereas any leading whitespace of follow lines is ignored, trailing whitespace before a escaped newline remains in the input.
• If the line (content) starts with the number sign ‘#’ then it is a comment-command and also ignored. (The comment-command is a real command, which does nothing, and therefore the usual follow lines mechanism applies!)

 # This line is a comment command.  And y\ 
    es, it is really continued here. 
set debug \ 
    verbose 
    set editheaders

The mime.types files

type/subtype extension [extension ...] 
# E.g., text/html html htm

@

Treat message parts with this content as plain text.

@t

The same as plain @.

@h

Treat message parts with this content as HTML tagsoup. If the [Option]al HTML-tagsoup-to-text converter is not available treat the content as plain text instead.

@H

Likewise @h, but instead of falling back to plain text require an explicit content handler to be defined.

@q

If no handler can be found a text message is displayed which says so. This can be annoying, for example signatures serve a contextual purpose, their content is of no use by itself. This marker will avoid displaying the text message.

The Mailcap files

compose

A program that can be used to compose a new body or body part in the given format. (Currently unused.)

composetyped

Similar to the compose field, but is to be used when the composing program needs to specify the ‘Content-type:’ header field to be applied to the composed data. (Currently unused.)

edit

A program that can be used to edit a body or body part in the given format. (Currently unused.)

print

A program that can be used to print a message or body part in the given format. (Currently unused.)

test

Specifies a program to be run to test some condition, e.g., the machine architecture, or the window system in use, to determine whether or not this mailcap entry applies. If the test fails, a subsequent mailcap entry should be sought; also see x-mailx-test-once.

needsterminal

This flag field indicates that the given shell command must be run on an interactive terminal. Mail will temporarily release the terminal to the given command in interactive mode, in non-interactive mode this entry will be entirely ignored; this flag implies x-mailx-noquote.

copiousoutput

A flag field which indicates that the output of the view command will be an extended stream of textual output that can be (re)integrated into Mail's normal visual display. It is mutually exclusive with needsterminal.

textualnewlines

A flag field which indicates that this type of data is line-oriented and that, if encoded in ‘base64’, all newlines should be converted to canonical form (CRLF) before encoding, and will be in that form after decoding. (Currently unused.)

nametemplate

This field gives a filename format, in which ‘%s’ will be replaced by a random string, the joined combination of which will be used as the filename denoted by MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY. One could specify that a GIF file being passed to an image viewer should have a name ending in ‘.gif’ by using ‘nametemplate=%s.gif’. Note that Mail ignores the name template unless that solely specifies a filename suffix that consists of (ASCII) alphabetic and numeric characters, the underscore and dot only.

x11-bitmap

Names a file, in X11 bitmap (xbm) format, which points to an appropriate icon to be used to visually denote the presence of this kind of data. This field is not used by Mail.

description

A textual description that describes this type of data.

x-mailx-even-if-not-interactive

An extension flag test field — by default handlers without copiousoutput are entirely ignored in non-interactive mode, but if this flag is set then their use will be considered. It is an error if this flag is set for commands that use the flag needsterminal.

x-mailx-noquote

An extension flag field that indicates that even a copiousoutput view command shall not be used to generate message quotes (as it would be by default).

x-mailx-async

Extension flag field that denotes that the given view command shall be executed asynchronously, without blocking Mail. Cannot be used in conjunction with needsterminal.

x-mailx-test-once

Extension flag which denotes whether the given test command shall be evaluated once only and the (boolean) result be cached. This is handy if some global unchanging condition is to be queried, like “running under the X Window System”.

x-mailx-tmpfile

Extension flag field that requests creation of a zero-sized temporary file, the name of which is to be placed in the environment variable MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY. It is an error to use this flag with commands that include a ‘%s’ format.

x-mailx-tmpfile-fill

Normally the MIME part content is passed to the handler via standard input; if this flag is set then the data will instead be written into the implied x-mailx-tmpfile. In order to cause deletion of the temporary file you will have to set x-mailx-tmpfile-unlink explicitly! It is an error to use this flag with commands that include a ‘%s’ format.

x-mailx-tmpfile-unlink

Extension flag field that requests that the temporary file shall be deleted automatically when the command loop is entered again at latest. (Do not use this for asynchronous handlers.) It is an error to use this flag with commands that include a ‘%s’ format, or in conjunction with x-mailx-async, or without also setting x-mailx-tmpfile or x-mailx-tmpfile-fill.

x-mailx-tmpfile-keep

Using the string ‘%s’ implies the three tmpfile related flags above, but if you want, e.g., x-mailx-async and deal with the temporary file yourself, you can add in this flag to forcefully ignore x-mailx-tmpfile-unlink.

application/postscript; ps-to-terminal %s; needsterminal 
application/postscript; ps-to-terminal %s; compose=idraw %s

# Message 
Content-type:  multipart/mixed; boundary=42 
 
# Mailcap file 
multipart/*; /usr/local/bin/showmulti \ 
  %t %{boundary}  ;  composetyped  = /usr/local/bin/makemulti 
 
# Executed shell command 
/usr/local/bin/showmulti multipart/mixed 42

# Comment line 
text/richtext; richtext %s; copiousoutput 
 
text/x-perl; perl -cWT %s 
 
application/pdf; \ 
  infile=%s\; \ 
    trap "rm -f ${infile}" EXIT\; \ 
    trap "exit 75" INT QUIT TERM\; \ 
    mupdf %s; \ 
  x-mailx-async; x-mailx-tmpfile-keep 
 
application/*; echo "This is \"%t\" but \ 
    is 50 \% Greek to me" \; < %s head -c 1024 | cat -vet; \ 
  copiousoutput; x-mailx-noquote

The .netrc file

• BSD does not support single, but only double quotation marks, e.g., ‘password="pass with spaces"’.
• BSD (only?) supports escaping of single characters via a reverse solidus (e.g., a space can be escaped via ‘\ ’), in- as well as outside of a quoted string.
• BSD does not require a final quotation mark of the last user input token.
• The original BSD (Berknet) parser also supported a format which allowed tokens to be separated with commas – whereas at least Hewlett-Packard still seems to support this syntax, Mail does not!
• As a non-portable extension some widely-used programs support shell-style comments: if an input line starts, after any amount of whitespace, with a number sign ‘#’, then the rest of the line is ignored.
• Whereas other programs may require that the .netrc file is accessible by only the user if it contains a password token for any other login than “anonymous”, Mail will always require these strict permissions.

machine name

The hostname of the entries' machine, lowercase-normalized by Mail before use. Any further file content, until either end-of-file or the occurrence of another machine or a default first-class token is bound (only related) to the machine name.

As an extension that should not be the cause of any worries Mail supports a single wildcard prefix for name:

machine *.example.com login USER password PASS 
machine pop3.example.com login USER password PASS 
machine smtp.example.com login USER password PASS
    

which would match ‘xy.example.com’ as well as ‘pop3.example.com’, but neither ‘example.com’ nor ‘local.smtp.example.com’. Note that in the example neither ‘pop3.example.com’ nor ‘smtp.example.com’ will be matched by the wildcard, since the exact matches take precedence (it is however faster to specify it the other way around).

default

This is the same as machine except that it is a fallback entry that is used shall none of the specified machines match; only one default token may be specified, and it must be the last first-class token.

login name

The user name on the remote machine.

password string

The user's password on the remote machine.

account string

Supply an additional account password. This is merely for FTP purposes.

macdef name

Define a macro. A macro is defined with the specified name; it is formed from all lines beginning with the next line and continuing until a blank line is (consecutive newline characters are) encountered. (Note that macdef entries cannot be utilized by multiple machines, too, but must be defined following the machine they are intended to be used with.) If a macro named init exists, it is automatically run as the last step of the login process. This is merely for FTP purposes.

EXAMPLES

An example configuration

# This example assumes v15.0 compatibility mode 
set v15-compat 
 
# Request strict TLL transport layer security checks 
set tls-verify=strict 
 
# Where are the up-to-date TLS certificates? 
# (Since we manage up-to-date ones explicitly, do not use any, 
# possibly outdated, default certificates shipped with OpenSSL) 
#set tls-ca-dir=/etc/ssl/certs 
set tls-ca-file=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt 
set tls-ca-no-defaults 
#set tls-ca-flags=partial-chain 
wysh set smime-ca-file="${tls-ca-file}" \ 
  smime-ca-no-defaults #smime-ca-flags="${tls-ca-flags}" 
 
# This could be outsourced to a central configuration file via 
# tls-config-file plus tls-config-module if the used library allows. 
# CipherString: explicitly define the list of ciphers, which may 
#   improve security, especially with protocols older than TLS v1.2. 
#   See ciphers(1).  Possibly best to only use tls-config-pairs-HOST 
#   (or -USER@HOST), as necessary, again.. 
#   Note that TLSv1.3 uses Ciphersuites= instead, which will join 
#   with CipherString (if protocols older than v1.3 are allowed) 
# Curves: especially with TLSv1.3 curves selection may be desired. 
# MinProtocol,MaxProtocol: do not use protocols older than TLS v1.2. 
#   Change this only when the remote server does not support it: 
#   maybe use chain support via tls-config-pairs-HOST / -USER@HOST 
#   to define such explicit exceptions, then, e.g. 
#     MinProtocol=TLSv1.1 
if [ "$tls-features" =% +ctx-set-maxmin-proto ] 
  wysh set tls-config-pairs='\ 
      CipherString=TLSv1.2:!aNULL:!eNULL:@STRENGTH,\ 
      Curves=P-521:P-384:P-256,\ 
      MinProtocol=TLSv1.1' 
else 
  wysh set tls-config-pairs='\ 
      CipherString=TLSv1.2:!aNULL:!eNULL:@STRENGTH,\ 
      Curves=P-521:P-384:P-256,\ 
      Protocol=-ALL\,+TLSv1.1 \, +TLSv1.2\, +TLSv1.3' 
endif 
 
# Essential setting: select allowed character sets 
set sendcharsets=utf-8,iso-8859-1 
 
# A very kind option: when replying to a message, first try to 
# use the same encoding that the original poster used herself! 
set reply-in-same-charset 
 
# When replying, do not merge From: and To: of the original message 
# into To:.  Instead old From: -> new To:, old To: -> merge Cc:. 
set recipients-in-cc 
 
# When sending messages, wait until the Mail-Transfer-Agent finishs. 
# Only like this you will be able to see errors reported through the 
# exit status of the MTA (including the built-in SMTP one)! 
set sendwait 
 
# Only use built-in MIME types, no mime.types(5) files 
set mimetypes-load-control 
 
# Default directory where we act in (relative to $HOME) 
set folder=mail 
# A leading "+" (often) means: under *folder* 
# *record* is used to save copies of sent messages 
set MBOX=+mbox.mbox DEAD=+dead.txt \ 
  record=+sent.mbox record-files record-resent 
 
# Make "file mymbox" and "file myrec" go to.. 
shortcut mymbox %:+mbox.mbox myrec +sent.mbox 
 
# Not really optional, e.g., for S/MIME 
set from='Your Name <address@exam.ple>' 
 
# It may be necessary to set hostname and/or smtp-hostname 
# if the "SERVER" of mta and "domain" of from do not match. 
# The `urlencode' command can be used to encode USER and PASS 
set mta=(smtps?|submissions?)://[USER[:PASS]@]SERVER[:PORT] \ 
  smtp-auth=login/plain... \ 
  smtp-use-starttls 
 
# Never refuse to start into interactive mode, and more 
set emptystart \ 
  colour-pager crt= \ 
  followup-to followup-to-honour=ask-yes fullnames \ 
  history-file=+.mailhist history-size=-1 history-gabby \ 
  mime-counter-evidence=0b1111 \ 
  prompt='?\$?!\$!/\$^ERRNAME[\$account#\$mailbox-display]? ' \ 
  reply-to-honour=ask-yes \ 
  umask= 
 
# Only include the selected header fields when typing messages 
headerpick type retain from_ date from to cc subject \ 
  message-id mail-followup-to reply-to 
# ...when forwarding messages 
headerpick forward retain subject date from to cc 
# ...when saving message, etc. 
#headerpick save ignore ^Original-.*$ ^X-.*$ 
 
# Some mailing lists 
mlist '@xyz-editor\.xyz$' '@xyzf\.xyz$' 
mlsubscribe '^xfans@xfans\.xyz$' 
 
# Handle a few file extensions (to store MBOX databases) 
filetype bz2 'bzip2 -dc' 'bzip2 -zc' \ 
  gz 'gzip -dc' 'gzip -c'  xz 'xz -dc' 'xz -zc' \ 
  zst 'zstd -dc' 'zstd -19 -zc' \ 
  zst.pgp 'gpg -d | zstd -dc' 'zstd -19 -zc | gpg -e' 
 
# A real life example of a very huge free mail provider 
# Instead of directly placing content inside `account', 
# we `define' a macro: like that we can switch "accounts" 
# from within *on-compose-splice*, for example! 
define XooglX { 
  set folder=~/spool/XooglX inbox=+syste.mbox sent=+sent 
  set from='Your Name <address@examp.ple>' 
 
  set pop3-no-apop-pop.gmXil.com 
  shortcut pop %:pop3s://pop.gmXil.com 
  shortcut imap %:imaps://imap.gmXil.com 
  # Or, entirely IMAP based setup 
  #set folder=imaps://imap.gmail.com record="+[Gmail]/Sent Mail" \ 
  #   imap-cache=~/spool/cache 
 
  set mta=smtp://USER:PASS@smtp.gmXil.com smtp-use-starttls 
  # Alternatively: 
  set mta=smtps://USER:PASS@smtp.gmail.com:465 
} 
account XooglX { 
  \call XooglX 
} 
 
# Here is a pretty large one which does not allow sending mails 
# if there is a domain name mismatch on the SMTP protocol level, 
# which would bite us if the value of from does not match, e.g., 
# for people who have a sXXXXeforge project and want to speak 
# with the mailing list under their project account (in from), 
# still sending the message through their normal mail provider 
define XandeX { 
  set folder=~/spool/XandeX inbox=+syste.mbox sent=+sent 
  set from='Your Name <address@exam.ple>' 
 
  shortcut pop %:pop3s://pop.yaXXex.com 
  shortcut imap %:imaps://imap.yaXXex.com 
 
  set mta=smtps://USER:PASS@smtp.yaXXex.com:465 \ 
    hostname=yaXXex.com smtp-hostname= 
} 
account XandeX { 
  \call Xandex 
} 
 
# Create some new commands so that, e.g., `ls /tmp' will.. 
commandalias lls '!ls ${LS_COLOUR_FLAG} -aFlrS' 
commandalias llS '!ls ${LS_COLOUR_FLAG} -aFlS' 
 
set pipe-message/external-body='@* echo $MAILX_EXTERNAL_BODY_URL' 
 
# We do not support gpg(1) directly yet.  But simple --clearsign'd 
# message parts can be dealt with as follows: 
define V { 
  localopts yes 
  wysh set pipe-text/plain=$'@*#++=@\ 
    < "${MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY}" awk \ 
        -v TMPFILE="${MAILX_FILENAME_TEMPORARY}" \'\ 
      BEGIN{done=0}\ 
      /^-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----/,/^$/ {\ 
        if(done++ != 0)\ 
          next;\ 
        print "--- GPG --verify ---";\ 
        system("gpg --verify " TMPFILE " 2>&1");\ 
        print "--- GPG --verify ---";\ 
        print "";\ 
        next;\ 
      }\ 
      /^-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----/,\ 
          /^-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----/{\ 
        next;\ 
      }\ 
      {print}\ 
    \'' 
    print 
} 
commandalias V '\'call V

define XandeX { 
  set folder=~/spool/XandeX inbox=+syste.mbox sent=+sent 
  set from='Your Name <address@exam.ple>' 
  set netrc-lookup 
  # Load an encrypted ~/.netrc by uncommenting the next line 
  #set netrc-pipe='gpg -qd ~/.netrc.pgp' 
 
  set mta=smtps://smtp.yXXXXx.ru:465 \ 
      smtp-hostname= hostname=yXXXXx.com 
  set pop3-keepalive=240 pop3-no-apop-pop.yXXXXx.ru 
  commandalias xp fi pop3s://pop.yXXXXx.ru 
} 
account XandeX { 
  \call XandeX 
}

machine *.yXXXXx.ru login USER password PASS

S/MIME step by step

$ openssl pkcs12 -in cert.p12 -out certpem.pem -clcerts -nodes 
$ # Alternatively 
$ openssl pkcs12 -in cert.p12 -out cert.pem -clcerts -nokeys 
$ openssl pkcs12 -in cert.p12 -out key.pem -nocerts -nodes

? set smime-ca-file=ALL-TRUSTED-ROOT-CERTS-HERE \ 
    smime-sign-cert=ME@HERE.com.paired \ 
    smime-sign-digest=SHA512 \ 
    smime-sign

Using CRLs with S/MIME or TLS

FAQ

Mail shortly hangs on startup

I cannot login to Google mail aka GMail

1. give the provider the number of a mobile phone,
2. enable “2-Step Verification”,
3. create an application specific password (16 characters), and
4. use that special password instead of the real Google account password in Mail (for more on that see the section On URL syntax and credential lookup).

Not "defunctional", but the editor key does not work

? set verbose 
? bind* 
# 1B 5B=[ 31=1 3B=; 32=2 48=H 
  bind base :kHOM z0 
? x 
$ cat -v 
^[[H 
$ mail -v -Stermcap='kHOM=\E[H' 
? bind* 
# 1B 5B=[ 48=H 
  bind base :kHOM z0

Can Mail git-send-email?

[sendemail] 
smtpserver = /usr/bin/s-mailx 
smtpserveroption = -t 
#smtpserveroption = -Sexpandaddr 
smtpserveroption = -Athe-account-you-need 
## 
suppresscc = all 
suppressfrom = false 
assume8bitEncoding = UTF-8 
#to = /tmp/OUT 
confirm = always 
chainreplyto = true 
multiedit = false 
thread = true 
quiet = true 
annotate = true

IMAP CLIENT

cache

Only applicable to cached IMAP mailboxes; takes a message list and reads the specified messages into the IMAP cache.

connect

If operating in disconnected mode on an IMAP mailbox, switch to online mode and connect to the mail server while retaining the mailbox status. See the description of the disconnected variable for more information.

disconnect

If operating in online mode on an IMAP mailbox, switch to disconnected mode while retaining the mailbox status. See the description of the disconnected variable for more. A list of messages may optionally be given as argument; the respective messages are then read into the cache before the connection is closed, thus ‘disco *’ makes the entire mailbox available for disconnected use.

imap

Sends command strings directly to the current IMAP server. Mail operates always in IMAP `selected state' on the current mailbox; commands that change this will produce undesirable results and should be avoided. Useful IMAP commands are:

create

Takes the name of an IMAP mailbox as an argument and creates it.

getquotaroot

(RFC 2087) Takes the name of an IMAP mailbox as an argument and prints the quotas that apply to the mailbox. Not all IMAP servers support this command.

namespace

(RFC 2342) Takes no arguments and prints the Personal Namespaces, the Other User's Namespaces and the Shared Namespaces. Each namespace type is printed in parentheses; if there are multiple namespaces of the same type, inner parentheses separate them. For each namespace a prefix and a hierarchy separator is listed. Not all IMAP servers support this command.

imapcodec

Perform IMAP path transformations. Supports vput (see Command modifiers), and manages the error number !. The first argument specifies the operation: e[ncode] normalizes hierarchy delimiters (see imap-delim) and converts the strings from the locale ttycharset to the internationalized variant used by IMAP, d[ecode] performs the reverse operation.

disconnected

(Boolean) When an IMAP mailbox is selected and this variable is set, no connection to the server is initiated. Instead, data is obtained from the local cache (see imap-cache). Mailboxes that are not present in the cache and messages that have not yet entirely been fetched from the server are not available; to fetch all messages in a mailbox at once, the command `copy * /dev/null' can be used while still in connected mode. Changes that are made to IMAP mailboxes in disconnected mode are queued and committed later when a connection to that server is made. This procedure is not completely reliable since it cannot be guaranteed that the IMAP unique identifiers (UIDs) on the server still match the ones in the cache at that time. Data is saved to DEAD when this problem occurs.

disconnected-USER@HOST

The specified account is handled as described for the disconnected variable above, but other accounts are not affected.

imap-auth-USER@HOST, imap-auth

Sets the IMAP authentication method. Valid values are `login' for the usual password-based authentication (the default), `cram-md5', which is a password-based authentication that does not send the password over the network in clear text, and `gssapi' for GSS-API based authentication.

imap-cache

Enables caching of IMAP mailboxes. The value of this variable must point to a directory that is either existent or can be created by Mail. All contents of the cache can be deleted by Mail at any time; it is not safe to make assumptions about them.

imap-delim-USER@HOST, imap-delim-HOST, imap-delim

The hierarchy separator used by the IMAP server. Whenever an IMAP path is specified it will undergo normalization. One of the normalization steps is the squeezing and adjustment of hierarchy separators. If this variable is set, any occurrence of any character of the given value that exists in the path will be replaced by the first member of the value; an empty value will cause the default to be used, it is ‘/.’. If not set, we will reuse the first hierarchy separator character that is discovered in a user-given mailbox name.

imap-keepalive-USER@HOST, imap-keepalive-HOST, imap-keepalive

IMAP servers may close the connection after a period of inactivity; the standard requires this to be at least 30 minutes, but practical experience may vary. Setting this variable to a numeric `value' greater than 0 causes a `NOOP' command to be sent each `value' seconds if no other operation is performed.

imap-list-depth

When retrieving the list of folders on an IMAP server, the folders command stops after it has reached a certain depth to avoid possible infinite loops. The value of this variable sets the maximum depth allowed. The default is 2. If the folder separator on the current IMAP server is a slash `/', this variable has no effect and the folders command does not descend to subfolders.

imap-use-starttls-USER@HOST, imap-use-starttls-HOST, imap-use-starttls

Causes Mail to issue a `STARTTLS' command to make an unencrypted IMAP session TLS encrypted. This functionality is not supported by all servers, and is not used if the session is already encrypted by the IMAPS method.

SEE ALSO

HISTORY

AUTHORS

CAVEATS

BUGS

? wysh set escape=! verbose; vput version xy; unset verbose;\ 
  eval mail $contact-mail 
Bug subject 
!I xy 
!.