Message Routing and Delivery

smail splits up mail delivery into three different tasks, the router, director, and transport module.

The router module resolves all remote addresses, determining to which host the message should be sent to next, and which transport must be used. Depending on the nature of the link, different transports such as UUCP or SMTP may be used.

Local addresses are given to the director task which resolves any forwarding or aliasing. For example, the address might be an alias or a mailing list, or the user might want to forward her mail to another address. If the resulting address is remote, it is handed to the router module for additional routing, otherwise it is assigned a transport for local delivery. By far the most common case will be delivery to a mailbox, but messages may also be piped into a command, or appended to some arbitrary file.

The transport module, finally, is responsible for whatever method of delivery has been chosen. It tries to deliver the message, and in case of failure either generates a bounce message, or defers it for a later retry.

With smail, you have much freedom in configuring these tasks. For each of them, a number of drivers are available, from which you can choose those you need. You describe them to smail in a couple of files, namely routers, directors, and transports, located in /usr/lib/smail. If these files do not exist, reasonable defaults are assumed that should be suitable for many sites that either use SMTP or UUCP for transport. If you want to change smail's routing policy, or modify a transport, you should get the sample files from the smail source distribution, copy the sample files to /usr/lib/smail, and modify them according to your needs. Sample configuration files are also given in Appendix-.