1 W e l c o m e t o S - n a i l / S - m a i l x
2 ===============================================
4 S-nail (later S-mailx) provides a simple and friendly environment for
5 sending and receiving mail. It is intended to provide the functionality
6 of the POSIX mailx(1) command, but is MIME capable and optionally offers
7 extensions for line editing, S/MIME, SMTP and POP3, among others.
8 S-nail divides incoming mail into its constituent messages and allows
9 the user to deal with them in any order. It offers many commands and
10 internal variables for manipulating messages and sending mail. It
11 provides the user simple editing capabilities to ease the composition of
12 outgoing messages, and increasingly powerful and reliable
13 non-interactive scripting capabilities.
15 Please refer to the file INSTALL for build and installation remarks,
16 and to NEWS for release update information. The file THANKS mentions
17 people who have helped improving and deserve acknowledgement.
19 This software originates in the codebase of Heirloom mailx, formerly
20 known as nail, which itself is based upon Berkeley Mail that has
21 a history back to 1978 and which superseded Unix mail, a program that
22 already shipped with First Edition Unix from 1971 -- M. Douglas McIlroy
23 writes in his article "A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from
24 the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986":
26 MAIL (v1 page 21, v7 page 22)
27 Electronic mail was there from the start. Never satisfied with its
28 exact behavior, everybody touched it at one time or another: to
29 assure the safety of simultaneous access, to improve privacy, to
30 survive crashes, to exploit uucp, to screen out foreign freeloaders,
31 or whatever. Not until v7 did the interface change (Thompson). [.]
41 Our latest release can be downloaded at [1], and the fully cross-
42 referenced manual can also be viewed as HTML online[2].
43 There are browsable git(1) repositories at sdaoden.eu[3] (use [4] for
44 cloning purposes), with mirrors at Sourceforge[5] and repo.or.cz[6].
46 [1] https?://www.sdaoden.eu/downloads/s-nail-latest.tar.{gz,xz}{,.asc}
47 [2] https?://www.sdaoden.eu/code.html#s-mailx
48 [3] https?://git.sdaoden.eu/cgit/s-nail.git
49 [4] https?://git.sdaoden.eu/scm/s-nail.git
50 [5] http://sourceforge.net/projects/s-nail
51 [6] http://repo.or.cz/s-mailx.git
53 We have a mailing list[7] with moderated unsubscribed posting
54 possibilities; subscriptions can be managed via web interface[8]; Gmane
55 added the ML their NNTP archive[9], and The Mail Archive archives
56 a browser-accessible and searchable web version[10] -- thank you!
57 Commits to the [master], [release/*] and [stable/*] branches will be
58 posted to [11], and announcements will also be posted to [12], both are
59 receive-only mailing-lists.
61 [7] s-mailx@lists.sdaoden.eu
62 [8] https://lists.sdaoden.eu/mailman/listinfo.cgi/s-mailx
63 [9] news.gmane.org/gmane.mail.s-nail.user
64 [10] www.mail-archive.com/s-nail-users@lists.sourceforge.net/maillist.html
65 [11] https://lists.sdaoden.eu/mailman/listinfo.cgi/s-mailx-commit
66 [12] https://lists.sdaoden.eu/mailman/listinfo.cgi/s-announce
68 Our heraldic animal snailmail.jpg has been found at [+1].
71 [+1] http://cdn.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/snailmail.jpg
77 A new branch within release/ is created for every release, e.g.,
78 [release/v14.8.10]. History won't be rewritten.
80 These branches consist of one commit, and that commit is signed with
81 an OpenPGP key and used for the signed release tag,
82 vMAJOR.MINOR.UPDATE.ar (.ar for "archive"). The commit as such
83 covers the data modifications that make up a release, i.e., release
84 date fixation, manual preprocessing, removal of data which doesn't
85 make sense in release tarballs, etc.
87 (Whereas all this is not true for older releases, the new repository
88 layout was introduced after v14.8.10, and used [timeline] as
89 a source for most references, therefore the signed tag v14.8.7.ar
90 protects all elder references within [release/]:
92 $ git describe --contains heads/release/v1.3.0
95 - [release/latest] and [release/stable]
96 "Symbolic links" to the latest and stable, respectively, release
100 A new branch within stable/ will be created for each new minor
101 version, e.g., [stable/v14.8]. History won't be rewritten.
103 These are the de-facto [master] branches for their respective minor
104 release, which extend for the full lifetime of the said, e.g., the
105 branch [stable/v14.7] has been created once the v14.7.0 release was
106 made, and it extends until the release of v14.7.11, the last v14.7
109 Once the time for a new release has come, the head of such a stable
110 branch will gain a signed commit and a signed stable tag,
111 vMAJOR.MINOR.UPDATE, and then be used as the source for a new branch
114 - [stable/latest] and [stable/stable]
115 "Symbolic links" to the latest and stable, respectively, stable
118 These are possibly what users should track which want to have the
119 newest non-release bugfixes and stable, backward-compatible commits.
120 See below for examples how to accomplish that.
123 Rooted on top of [heirloom]. It gains only stable, but possibly
124 backward-incompatible changes (usually mentioned on the ML), and
125 will be used to create new entries in stable/. It may gain signed
126 commits for sealing purposes from time to time.
127 History won't be rewritten.
130 Rooted on top of [master], this consists of a furious mixture of
131 commits that eventually end up in [master]. Daring users may give
132 this branch a try, but bugs and temporary nonstarters have to be
136 Developer chaos (distributed horror backup - don't use!).
139 This branch contains the test output files. The test itself only
140 tests checksums, the full output is for development reference
143 - [unix-mail,bsd-Mail,timeline]
144 Sketchy efforts to collect the complete history of Unix mail and
145 its successor, BSD Mail. Anything from the pre-nail era has been
146 taken from CSRG and TUHS, for nail and Heirloom mailx i have used
149 The [timeline] branch was the original effort, and it will be
150 continuously be extended whenever new releases will be made, but its
151 history won't be rewritten, which is why it is a sketchy effort.
152 The [unix-mail] and [bsd-Mail] branches have been added later, and
153 will hopefully offer the most complete picture possible as time goes
154 by (not taking into account the "nupas" effort of Research Unix,
155 though) -- this means their history may change, but all commits are
156 signed with an OpenPGP key.
159 A full git(1) cvsimport of the Heirloom mailx(1) cvs(1) repository.
161 To create a full clone of the repository, with all the data and history:
162 $ git clone https://git.sdaoden.eu/scm/s-nail.git
164 With a newer git(1), and only tracking the latest stable branch:
165 $ git clone --single-branch --branch=stable/latest \
166 https://git.sdaoden.eu/scm/s-nail.git
168 Or, being selective, also with older git(1)s:
172 $ git remote add origin -t 'release/*' -t stable/stable -t master \
173 https://git.sdaoden.eu/scm/s-nail.git
176 And then, assuming the last had been done:
178 $ # Show all releases
179 $ git log --no-walk --decorate --oneline --branches='release/*' --
180 $ # Check out the latest release, and verify the signature
181 $ git checkout release/latest
182 $ git log --oneline --show-signature --max-count=1 HEAD
183 $ make all && sudo make install
188 - CVE-2004-2771, and CVE-2014-7844.
189 http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q4/1066.
190 Fixed in: v14.7.9 (on day after announcement on oss-sec)
192 Affected all BSD Mail-based codebases.
196 Fixed in: v14.8.16 (on day of disclosure)
198 > vulnerability in the setuid root helper binary
200 > The problem is that an O_EXCL file is created with a user controlled
201 > path because the di.di_hostname and di.di_randstr are never checked.
202 > This means that using s-nail-privsep a normal user can create a file
203 > anywhere on the filesystem, which is a security problem.
208 Unix mail seems to have been written mostly by Ken Thompson.
210 Berkeley Mail was (according to def.h) developed by Kurt Shoens, dated
211 March 25, 1978. According to the CSRG commit log authors of BSD mail in
212 the time span 1980-10-08 to 1995-05-01 were, in order of appearance
213 (commit count): Kurt Shoens (379), Kirk McKusick (50), Carl Smith (16),
214 Bill Bush (2), Eric Allman (6), Craig Leres (43), Sam Leffler (51),
215 Ralph Campbell (21), Serge Granik (28), Edward Wang (253),
216 Donn Seeley (1), Jay Lepreau (3), Jim Bloom (1), Anne Hughes (2),
217 Kevin Dunlap (34), Keith Bostic (253), Mike Karels (1), Cael Staelin (6)
218 and Dave Borman (17). One commit by Charlie Root, 36 by "dist".
220 Official BSD Mail development ceased in 1995 according to the CSRG
221 (Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group) repository. Mail has then
222 seen further development in open source BSD variants, noticeably by
223 Christos Zoulas in NetBSD.
225 Gunnar Ritter reused that codebase when he started developing nail in
226 February 2000, and incorporated numerous patches from OpenBSD, NetBSD,
227 RedHat and Debian. He added MIME code, network protocol support, and
228 POSIX conformance improvements. In March 2006, he integrated that
229 program into the Heirloom project, renaming it to Heirloom mailx, the
230 development of which ceased in 2008.
232 In 2012 Steffen (Daode) Nurpmeso adopted the codebase as S-nail.
233 We try to end up as S-mailx.