F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 19.07.13 19:37, Miloslav Trmač (mitr at volny.cz) 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.

Sure it is valuable. However, it's also a pretty bad API, since it
currently will accept all messages but in most cases silently eat them
up and devlier to a mailbox that constantly grows and is never
checked. APIs that claim to work but actually don't, and where there's
*no* way to figure that out are just inhrently broken. 

In general, we should work on centralizing things more, we certainly
agree on that. However, I find it really surprising to draw the line
here between logs generated by cron jobs (and similar cases) where
traditionally mails were sent, and the rest were traditionally logfiles
were written. That makes very little sense...

If you want to centralize system configuration, rather then services,
then go ahead and do, that, but actually centralize *the configuration*,
not the service. In particular, because a centralized client-side SMTP
service is a really questionnable thing on today's Internet where SMTP
delivery connections are almost always authenticated by a *user* id. Due
to that they are generally much better configured in the MUA which
actually run in the user context instead of a system service which lacks
all that and where no infrastructure exists for supplying user
authentication information.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.