F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 07:37:35PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
> However, having the /usr/sbin/sendmail API available to applications
> is valuable - it brings a significant system administration benefit of
> centralizing the SMTP configuration.

What does it mean to "have available"? As discussed earlier, I think it's
significantly better for applications to get errors (which they can handle)
than to think they've sent a message which really gets buried forever.

And it's just not possible to automatically configure e-mail. It might have
been in 1997, when every system was directly connected to the Internet,
every network allowed port 25 out, and everyone accepted mail from
everywhere. None of those things are true now -- not just not true in some
cases, but not true in the common case.

I think the way forward is to encourage applications to _log_ rather than to
send e-mail, via this or any other API. That can be configured for e-mail
alerts if the admin really wants. But without configuration, nothing is
going to happen _anyway_.


-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>