Mail delivery agent


A mail delivery agent or message delivery agent is a computer software component that is responsible for the delivery of e-mail messages to a local recipient's mailbox. It is also called a local delivery agent.
Within the Internet mail architecture, local message delivery is achieved through a process of handling messages from the message transfer agent, and storing mail into the recipient's environment.

Implementation

Many mail handling software products bundle multiple message delivery agents with the message transfer agent component, providing for site customization of the specifics of mail delivery to a user.

Unix

On Unix-like systems, procmail and maildrop are the most popular MDAs. The Local Mail Transfer Protocol is a protocol that is frequently implemented by network-aware MDAs.

Invocation

The mail delivery agent is generally not started from the command line, but is usually invoked by mail delivery subsystems, such as a mail transport agent, or a mail retrieval agent.

List of MDA software for Unix-like platforms