F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Lennart Poettering
<mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 22.07.13 18:43, Miloslav Trmač (mitr at volny.cz) wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Lennart Poettering
>> <mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
>> > On Fri, 19.07.13 20:22, Miloslav Trmač (mitr at volny.cz) wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Matthew Miller
>> >> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> > Where "expected to do" means effectively route it to /dev/null?
>>
>> It's actually less similar to /dev/null than log files are - log files
>> are rotated and deleted, mail stays in the mail boxes until explicitly
>> deleted (or space runs out).
>
> Well, so it's even a DoS... Just find some trigger to generate a lot of
> mails to root and /var will eventually fill up, even beyond those 10%
> reserved for root, since well, mail to root is accounted to root...

My concern about this proposal doesn't actually depend on local
delivery, it _could_ go to /dev/null by default for all I care.

I'll note, however, that "this is a DoS" is rarely a convincing
argument - the only practical way to combat a DoS is to impose some
kind of limit, which is just a DoS of a different kind.  You get to
choose _what_ kinds of DoS your computer will be subject to, but with
finite CPU power and storage you can't avoid DoS situations.

And, philosophically, silently losing data is generally much worse
than requiring manual intervention for the system to run when space
runs out.  (Not that the mails we sent by default are _that_ valuable,
though.)
    Mirek