mailcompat is a program to provide SunOS 4.x compatability for the Solaris mailbox format. You would typically run mailcompat to be able to read mail on a workstation running SunOS 4.x when your mail server is running Solaris.

Enabling mailcompat creates an entry in your .forward file, if it exists. If this file does not exist, mailcompat will create it. Disabling mailcompat will remove the entry from the .forward file, and if this was the only entry, will remove the entire file.

To execute mailcompat, log onto the Solaris mail server and enter mailcompat on the command line. Answer the queries provided by the program.

See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of mailcompat when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2^31 bytes).

Example 1 Examples of the mailcompat feature.

The following example enables the mailcompat feature for the user "john".

example% mailcompat
This program can be used to store your mail in a format
that you can read with SunOS 4.X based mail readers
To enable the mailcompat feature a ".forward" file is created.
Would you like to enable the mailcompat feature? Y
Mailcompat feature ENABLED.Run mailcompat with no arguments to remove it
example%

The following example disables the mailcompat feature for the user "john".

example% mailcompat
This program can be used to store your mail in a format
that you can read with SunOS 4.X based mail readers
You have a .forward file in your home directory containing:
 "|/usr/bin/mailcompat johns"
Would you like to remove it and disable the mailcompat feature? y
Back to normal reception of mail.
example%

~/.forward

mailx(1), attributes(5), largefile(5)