🚀 go-pugleaf

Someone at my site requested a man page for movemail, since it's not
documented at all.  Here it is, if you want to stick it in etc along
with the other man pages.

.TH MOVEMAIL 1L "GNU Emacs" "FSF"
.SH NAME
movemail \- move mail from an inbox to a user file safely
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B movemail
.I inbox
.I destfile
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B movemail
moves mail from an inbox spool
.I inbox
into another file
.IR destfile ,
locking
.I inbox
the way that the local mail delivery program respects.  It is used by
the GNU Emacs Rmail package and other programs that need to write to
mail files.
.PP
The locking is required by the mailer to prevent loss of mail.
Depending on local conventions, the locking might be done by calling
.B flock
or
.B lockf
on
.I inbox
or by creating a file
.I inbox.lock
in the same directory as
.IR inbox .
On systems that use a lock file, if creation of the lock file fails
due to access permission on the directory, you must change the
directory's access permissions and/or make
.B movemail
a setgid or setuid program so it can create lock files properly.
.PP
If
.I inbox
has the form
.IR po:username ,
then it is assumed to be a POP inbox instead of a file, and
.B movemail
opens a connection to the POP server running on the host named by the
.B MAILHOST
environment variable.
In order to work with POP,
.B movemail
must be setuid to root, because POP uses a privileged TCP port.