F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

mattdm wrote:

> [...]
> 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.

There exist /usr/lib/sendmail submission-only imitators (ssmtp, msmtp)
that could be trained to block until mail is delivered, and return
error return codes upon rejection.

> And it's just not possible to automatically configure e-mail. [...]

As for outgoing SMTP, DHCP packets can identify servers; so can DNS heuristics.

> 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_.

Such a transition should come along with all the tooling needed to
emulate the status quo - i.e., scraped-log-to-email scripts.


- FChE