innmail(1): Simple mail-sending program

NAME

SYNOPSIS

innmail [-h] [-s subject] address [address ...]

DESCRIPTION

innmail is a Perl script intended to provide the non-interactive mail-sending functionality of mail(1) while avoiding nasty security problems. It takes the body of a mail message on standard input and sends it to the specified addresses by invoking the value of mta in inn.conf.

At least one address (formatted for the MTA specified in inn.conf, if it matters) is required. innmail will sanitize the addresses so that they contain only alphanumerics and the symbols "@", ".", "-", "+", "_", and "%".

innmail was written to be suitable for the mailcmd setting in inn.conf.

OPTIONS

-h: Gives usage information.
-s subject: Sets the Subject: header of the message. A warning is issued if this option is omitted.

EXAMPLES

This sends a one-line message to the local user "joe":

    echo "A one-line message." | innmail -s "Simple message" joe

innmail by default is used by INN for sending nightly reports and control message reports.

BUGS

innmail fails on addresses that begin with "-", although one might hope that the news server will not need to contact any such addresses.

There are many ``correct'' addresses that will be silently modified by the sanitization process. A news administrator should be careful to use particularly sane addresses if they may be passed to innmail.

HISTORY

innmail was written by James Brister <brister@vix.com> for InterNetNews. This manual page was originally written by Jeffrey M. Vinocur.