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

[Lars E. Pettersson]

On 01/02/2014 08:31 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> Right. I wasn't informed they exist, therefore they are not important messages.

You not being informed has nothing to do with the importance of the 
message content.

(My proposal was a direct hit at this, making it clear for the user that 
potentially important mails are generated on a Linux systems, and giving 
a way for you to receive them)

> 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.

Again, this was the reason for my earlier proposal to include a setup of 
/etc/aliases at first bot setup of the system,.

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

If new mail arrives while you are logged in as root you will be 
informed. But again, my proposal was to remove this problem by making 
spool mail visible to the user.

>> How you miss it?
>
> Miss what? Typing a word I have no reason to type?

Sorry, my bad, I was just repeating your question, the two following 
paragraphs was the answer to that question.

>> 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.

In what way is it obsolete?

> 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.

Well, then you miss potentially important mails from the system.

>> 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.

No.

> 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.

Please read my proposal again, it addresses the issues you are mentioning.

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