maildrop

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For the postal mail term "mail drop", see Commercial mail receiving agency.

maildrop - mail delivery agent (MDA) with filtering abilities from Double Precision Inc, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

1 Introduction
2 Functions
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Introduction

maildrop is the mail filter/mail delivery agent that's used by the Courier Mail Server. You do not need to download maildrop if you already have Courier installed. A standalone build of the maildrop mail filter that can be used with other mail servers is available.

maildrop is written in C++, and is significantly larger than procmail. However, it uses resources much more efficiently.

Unlike procmail, maildrop will not read a large mail message into memory. Large messages are saved in a temporary file, and are filtered from the temporary file. If the standard input to maildrop is a file, and not a pipe, a temporary file will not be necessary.^[1]

[edit] Functions

maildrop is a replacement for your local mail delivery agent. maildrop reads a mail message from standard input, then delivers the message to your mailbox. maildrop knows how to deliver mail to mailbox storage formats mbox and maildir.

maildrop optionally reads instructions from a file, which describe how to filter incoming mail. These instructions can direct maildrop to deliver the message to an alternate mailbox, or forward it somewhere else. Unlike procmail, maildrop uses a structured filtering language.

maildrop checks the mail delivery instruction syntax from the filter file, before attempting to deliver a message. Unlike procmail, if the filter file contains syntax errors, maildrop terminates without delivering the message. The user can fix the typo without causing any mail to be lost.^[1]