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

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 3, 2014, at 12:32 PM, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se> wrote:
>> On 01/03/2014 12:01 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> 
>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F20_release_announcement#No_Default_Sendmail.2C_Syslog
>> 
>> Rahul, as long as we have applications that do send mail, we need an MTA to
>> take care of these mails, or else they are totally lost. Or at least let
>> those applications have a requirement of a MTA so that the MTA is installed
>> when those applications are installed on the system.
> 
> The point that Chris has made is that these messages were already lost
> for most users because they didn't actually exist.

Well…to be more specific I'm suggesting they're functionally equivalent to lost because their existence is obscured. Until this issue came up on devel I didn't know there were messages going to /var/spool/mail/root. I was then reminded of 24 years prior logging into UNIX computers at school and upon text login getting a notification that I had some mails and I'd use some mail program to read them. And I thought, umm, it's 2013 and this ancient mechanism is still in place? Seriously? Let's look at these emails. Oh…it's all junk. Great. How do I turn this craptasticness off?

So the idea there are any useful emails in there for most users is total b.s. as far as I'm concerned. And for anyone who configures something that will produce meaningful messages, they can yum install <mtaofchoice>, nothing prevents that. But I will argue that such programs are broken for contemporary work flow. But such is nice about most things F/OSS you can still run them, and cobble together some other ancient thing so you're getting some notifications from this archaic madness that still works otherwise OK (I assume or why use it?).

And default installation of an MTA does not fix any problem at all, it just means a minority don't have to do  yum install <mta> and the majority go on oblivious to uselessly faux-important messages sucking up space on their computer without notification. That is not fixable. Email is the wrong way to do it.


Chris Murphy