F20 - Unintended consequences of no default MTA - How best to fix

[Lars E. Pettersson]

On 01/02/2014 03:39 AM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> I'm sorry but I do not see the reasoning behind the assumption:
> non-technical implies "we need to protect them from good practice".

Perhaps a bad term to use on my part. New Linux user would perhaps be 
better. The idea was to make it easier for them to discover problems 
with their system. As the MTA has been removed, they will potentially 
miss important information.

> What does removing an MTA (IOW system mail) serve?  If the argument is
> saving resources, then one could counter argue a non-technical user is
> less likely to care about "saving system resources".

With current day computers an MTA for local delivery is no problem at 
all. They have all been locked down for quite a long time (only 
accepting mail from 127.0.0.1) so they have no big security risk either.

Lennart Poettring mentioned the following reasons (07/22/2013 06:36 PM, 
"Re: F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail")

"since the current way it is set up by default it just eats up messages
silently, with not indication of error and no useful tools installed to
actually get the messages out of it again."

I think, based on other writings, that he means that mail is eaten up by 
being delivered to /var/spool/mail/root where the user can not read it. 
With no useful tool he means that we have no mail client that can read 
spool mail.

Spool mail can be read by mutt, Thunderbird, and probably other mail 
clients. What is needed is an easy way to get the mail to a suitable 
user. That is where my proposal comes in.

So, in my opinion, removing a local delivery MTA was wrong. It should be 
added again, and something in the line of my proposal should be added so 
that root mail is sent to a suitable user.

Lars
-- 
Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se>
http://www.sm6rpz.se/