### 3.12 mda ¶

GNU local mail delivery agent reads a message from its standard input and delivers it to one or more local recipients listed in the command line. When we speak about local recipients, we mean that these are system users that are known to the system that runs `mda`. However, the mailboxes of these users can be local as well as remote ones. `mda` is able to deliver mail to any mailbox format, supported by GNU Mailutils. These formats, among others, include ‘`smtp://`’, ‘`prog://`’ and ‘`sendmail://`’ which are equivalent to forwarding a message over SMTP to a remote node.

`Mda` is also able to process incoming messages using Sieve, Scheme or Python scripts and, based on results of this processing, to take a decision on whether to actually deliver and where to deliver them. Due to its extensive scripting facilities, `mda` offers much more flexibility than other popular MDAs.