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

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 01/02/2014 02:31 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2014, at 12:09 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:
>
>> On 01/02/2014 07:52 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>> On Jan 2, 2014, at 5:34 AM, Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se> wrote:
>> ...
>>>> Important mail to/from root is not an "edge case".
>>> So important that by default root isn't informed of these messages?
>> Huh?
> Right. I wasn't informed they exist, therefore they are not important messages.
>
>
>>> With sendmail I was not informed of any such messages when logging in as root. Without sendmail, there's been no change in behavior at all. So what am I missing, exactly? How am I missing it?
>> Log in as root, write mail, press enter, there you go.
> The *overwhelming* use case of Fedora, users login at gdm into gnome-shell. They don't login as root. How are these users informed of silently accumulating emails? Oh, they aren't. Guess they aren't important messages.

In most cases you are right.  But then comes that case where if you had 
known...  That is why root mail should be sent to the admin user via 
/etc/aliases.   Ever since adding the concept of an admin user to get 
around stopping users for having to be root so much, it could have been 
easy to do this.