F20 Where's my system mail?

[Andreas M. Kirchwitz]

Arthur Dent <misc.lists at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

 > I have read this page:
 > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/NoDefaultSendmail
 
Yes, Fedora's great plan of no default sendmail basically means that
they simply do no longer install sendmail (default MTA). That's all.

All software (crond, raid-check, logwatch etc.) still sends mail,
but now it just gets silently deleted.

A good concept for system design would have taken into account that
software needs new configuration on how to deal with the information
that was sent out via mail previously. There's no point in still having
all software configured to send out mail but not installing an MTA.
That doesn't solve the problem.

 > Without a functioning MTA how can I now achieve the same result?
 > Although I can ssh into the box, and I do often check logs etc, it is
 > reassuring to know when something has happened I would get an email, and
 > the regular output in email-form from logwatch was something I would
 > check every day.
 >
 > Can I get this functionality back without the pain of configuring
 > postfix or (shudder) sendmail? If so how?
 
Fedora still offers MTA software, eg sendmail, in their repositories
(so you get all security updates, bug fixes etc.)  After your fresh
installation of F20 you could simply run "yum install sendmail" and
have the exact same setup as all the years before.

However, I agree, that having a full-blown MTA on a desktop PC is
somewhat weird. I've tried to go with "msmtp" (supported by Fedora).
It's basically a "mail forwarder". It offers a "sendmail"-style
binary and forwards all input to a preconfigured SMTP host (each
user can have its own configuration).

At first, "msmtp" looked like a good solution, but the configuration
overhead was much higher than putting a smart-host in sendmail.cf.

Finally, I got msmtp working but I'm still not really happy
(it doesn't rewrite destination addresses for aliased forwards,
and that's a big problem with today's spam filters), so I will
revert to sendmail in F21.

Alternatively, you could install procmail and reconfigure all
software to use procmail instead of sendmail to handle mail.
Procmail allows delivery to local mailboxes if that's all you need.
In my setup, I don't want local mail on my desktop PCs (that's
indeed useless) but have all mail forwarded to a SMTP smart-host
(where my primary mail-account is located).

Another alternative is mailx. It even allows for remote
delivery. Sounds really cool. But totally fails on SMTP servers
with self-signed certificates. That's uncool.

In any case, reconfiguring all software to use something different
than the old-school "sendmail" binary requires more time than just
installing (and configuring) sendmail itself.

As long as Fedora still officially supports sendmail in their
repositories, all is well.

	Greetings, Andreas