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

[Pete Travis]

On Jan 2, 2014 12:26 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:
>
> On 01/02/2014 08:09 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>
>> On Jan 2, 2014, at 11:45 AM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:
>>>
>>> It delivers mail, so it certainly does something. It is not an idle
process doing nothing.
>>
>>
>> I've never seen it do anything since I started using Fedora, except
cause longer boot times.
>
>
> Strange, what kind of install do you have?
>
> Long boot time would be it waiting for network, otherwise it starts
quickly.
>
> 9.093s postfix.service (my mailserver)
> 64ms sendmail.service (my desktop)
>
>
>>> A user only needs to know how to edit /etc/aliases, i.e. add a line
'root: <username>' to it, run newaliases (or something in the line of my
proposal earlier), and to setup the mail client to read that mail. Not more
esoteric than to setup ordinary mail.
>>
>>
>> It's a minority use case.
>
>
> How can it be a minority use case?

>
>
>>> Not having a MTA leads to lost mail, this has to be addressed and
solved before the MTA is removed.
>>
>>
>> Presumably if it's that important, an error is generated due to the lack
of an MTA? If not, then it's not important. If ithere is an error, then at
least it's being logged somewhere where it might be seen,
>
>
> Someone sent a question about how to read mail to root without the MTA
delivering it. It was logged that cron had a problem, but the output from
cron, usually sent as a mail, was lost.
>
> Exactly this question I asked Lennart Poettering on the devel list, but
sadly got no answer.
>
> How do we solve this problem without an MTA? (cron output lost)
>
>
> > rather than the sendmail by default case which is the silent
accumulation of emails in /var/spool/mail/root that most users have *no
idea* is happening, and even if you managed to inform a majority of users
this is happening,
>
> This was the reason behind my proposal, to make it more obvious to the
user that (possible) important mails from the system show up in spool mail.
>
>
>> the majority (like me) still have no idea how to retrieve, redirect, or
stop them from being unnecessarily generated.
>
>
> In what way unnecessary? If cron has problems, do you not want to know
the output of that cron job, to be able to solve the problem?
>
>
> Lars
> --

Before, if you suspected a problem with a crond job, you looked at the
user's mail. Now, if you suspect a problem with a cron job, you look at the
journal.

Is there something you expect to see that is missing from the journal?

--Pete
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