F20 Where's my system mail?

[Arthur Dent]

On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 16:40 +0000, Andreas M. Kirchwitz wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for that. I agree with much of what you say. If you still have my
very first message in this thread you will notice that I have a
fetchmail->procmail->dovecot setup. I didn't make it clear in that
message, but this machine is not a desktop, but a small home server
where I collect mail from various different ISPs and filter/deliver it
to the users (my family members). So I am already using procmail. I did
try yum install'ing postfix, but that seemed to bounce all my mail -
something that terrified me.

All this machine really does is collect POP/IMAP mail from various ISPs,
it is not a full-blown mail-server. I really don't want an MTA. If I
could get by with fetchmail-> procmail alone I would (and in fact that
seems to work for outside mails coming in). What I was missing was the
system messages and cron output in the form of emails, which I really
rely on for keeping tabs on what is happening with this machine. For
that - it seems - I need an MTA (or do I?).

Anyway - if you see the final message in the the original thread you
will see that, following a reboot, I now appear to have cron mail once
again.

Thanks for all your help.

Mark