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

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 2, 2014, at 12:49 PM, "Lars E. Pettersson" <lars at homer.se> wrote:

> 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.

You're right, there's an alternative. The message is important, but the system of informing the user is broken by default. Sort of like being a manager and having an incompetent employee fail to tell me about something important.

> 
> (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)

I don't configure a mail client on my Fedora system. So unless it's going to, out of the box start sending mail to my gmail account, these questionably important mails aren't getting to me in any case.


>> 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,.

Seriously, if my computer starts spamming me with these messages, I want to throw a brick at it. This is the WORST most user hostile, irritating as hell, method of informing me of important system issues. If it's that fricking important, put up a banner or alert. Do not send me email. Email is for unimportant low priority bulk crap messages that can be ignored for hours, days, weeks, or even months at a time.

> 
>> 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.

And the spool mail would manifest how? I mean, I'm first refusing the premise that any of these messages are even that important because I looked at them and they were in fact all universally unimportant. I'd rather read advertisements for fishing lures than these emails.

>>> 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?

It doesn't notify by default.
It doesn't contain any useful information.
I do not want to be informed of anything important by email.

Across the board it's simply not efficient or effective. My phones, my other computers, do not use an MTA, do not inform me of problems via email, because there are better ways to do it. And just like was mentioned six months ago, even for servers, especially cloud, real monitoring software exists to do this correctly, e.g. Nagios, Icigna, etc.


> 
>> 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.

Perfectly useless emails from what I've seen on my own system, once discovered and made even more useless because they were so old and outdated. It's a bad system. I didn't work. By default. It utterly failed to meet any goal at all other than to consume resources.



> 
>>> 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.

Yes, they were never viewed and the user was never informed of their existence. That method was fundamentally broken, which is why iOS, Android, Windows, OS X do not use such useless methods of informing users of supposedly important things. If it's important, use a banner or alert.

>> 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.

Really? It'll send messages to a gmail account by entering just a few fields of information?

OH but wait, I don't really want more email because I think email in general sucks because of abuse just like this. And on top of it, from my sampling, the messages were useless, so had I been getting them by email, I'd have considered them spam and it would have made me angry that I was receiving them.

I'm glad Fedora caught up with the rest of modern computing and got rid of it by default.

And guess what! You can still install it and get the behavior you want.


Chris Murphy