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

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 2, 2014, at 12:09 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:

> On 01/02/2014 07:52 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> On Jan 2, 2014, at 5:34 AM, Lars E. Pettersson <lars at homer.se> wrote:
> ...
>>> Important mail to/from root is not an "edge case".
>> 
>> So important that by default root isn't informed of these messages?
> 
> Huh?

Right. I wasn't informed they exist, therefore they are not important messages.


> 
>> With sendmail I was not informed of any such messages when logging in as root. Without sendmail, there's been no change in behavior at all. So what am I missing, exactly? How am I missing it?
> 
> Log in as root, write mail, press enter, there you go.

The *overwhelming* use case of Fedora, users login at gdm into gnome-shell. They don't login as root. How are these users informed of silently accumulating emails? Oh, they aren't. Guess they aren't important messages.

And even in the case where I do login as root, why would I type mail? How would that ever occur to me?

> 
> How you miss it?

Miss what? Typing a word I have no reason to type?


> With an MTA mail is delivered to root until you change /etc/aliases. To read roots mail you have to login as root and run a mail client. With a change of the aliases file you can chose to deliver root mail to a user, on the current system, another system, or a combination of these. The mail is read using a mail client.

Sounds like it's from the pleistocene of computing. It's obsolete for the majority. 

But happy days, you can just yum install and get the result you want, it's self-evident for your use case. It's not self-evident how I get rid of useless things that I don't even know exist, so the burden shouldn't be on me. Thanks to FESCO for getting rid of this crusty thing I never used or benefited from in any way shape or form.


> Without an MTA these mails are totally lost, they do not appear in /var/spool/mail/root, nor any other user, they are never deliver, and thereby lost.

They were being lost anyway.

When the devel@ mega thread appeared in July, was the first time inyears I went to look for these messages. And I found a pile of utterly useless crap being generated; and without notification, or a good reason for them to be generated in the first place. I'm glad it's gone by default.


Chris Murphy