Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
but you never give a valid reason why that should be the default. Everything I hear comes back to "That is the way I use it, so it should be configured that way."
Email would not be useful if someone doesn't accept network connections. So even if not everyone needs it, clearly some do.
I find the default configuration very reasonable on my laptop. Quite often I use the laptop in standalone mode with *no* network connection. System generated e-mails (e.g., logwatch, various cron jobs, etc.) queue locally on the system with the default sendmail configuration. *nix systems have relied on having local mail for this purpose for several decades. Linux is no different.
With this approach I can look at the various e-mails to root using something like pine or even mail or mailx but I can still retrieve my user mail when I have an network connection since my mail client is configured to access my POP/IMAP server. I find this very useful. I would guess that the majority of Linux laptop users would agree. I definitely do not want sendmail to accept non-local connections on my laptop.
Cheers, Dave