F20 - Unintended consequences of no default MTA - How best to fix

[Lars E. Pettersson]

On 01/02/2014 08:09 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2014, at 11:45 AM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:
>> It delivers mail, so it certainly does something. It is not an idle process doing nothing.
>
> I've never seen it do anything since I started using Fedora, except cause longer boot times.

Strange, what kind of install do you have?

Long boot time would be it waiting for network, otherwise it starts quickly.

9.093s postfix.service (my mailserver)
64ms sendmail.service (my desktop)

>> A user only needs to know how to edit /etc/aliases, i.e. add a line 'root: <username>' to it, run newaliases (or something in the line of my proposal earlier), and to setup the mail client to read that mail. Not more esoteric than to setup ordinary mail.
>
> It's a minority use case.

How can it be a minority use case?

>> Not having a MTA leads to lost mail, this has to be addressed and solved before the MTA is removed.
>
> Presumably if it's that important, an error is generated due to the lack of an MTA? If not, then it's not important. If ithere is an error, then at least it's being logged somewhere where it might be seen,

Someone sent a question about how to read mail to root without the MTA 
delivering it. It was logged that cron had a problem, but the output 
from cron, usually sent as a mail, was lost.

Exactly this question I asked Lennart Poettering on the devel list, but 
sadly got no answer.

How do we solve this problem without an MTA? (cron output lost)

 > rather than the sendmail by default case which is the silent 
accumulation of emails in /var/spool/mail/root that most users have *no 
idea* is happening, and even if you managed to inform a majority of 
users this is happening,

This was the reason behind my proposal, to make it more obvious to the 
user that (possible) important mails from the system show up in spool mail.

> the majority (like me) still have no idea how to retrieve, redirect, or stop them from being unnecessarily generated.

In what way unnecessary? If cron has problems, do you not want to know 
the output of that cron job, to be able to solve the problem?

Lars
-- 
Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se>
http://www.sm6rpz.se/