Re: no default mta [was Re: Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, “Why?”)]

[Rick Stevens]

On 03/21/2014 10:30 AM, Matthew Miller issued this missive:
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 10:27:02AM -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
>> If you do need to use sendmail, and your ISP is blocking Port 25,
>> it's not that hard to configure things to use a smarthost.  As an
>> example, I have my own (vanity) domain and use its mail servers,
>> over Port 587.  I also have sendmail configured to use that server
>> and port, along with the appropriate username/password.  If anybody
>> out there needs to do the same thing, instructions are at
>> http://www.zeff.us/SMTPAuth.txt
>
> Absolutely. But since you need to configure it before it's useful, it's
> arguably actively harmful to have it running by default. That's all. No one
> is removing MTAs from the distro.

I agree that an MTA needs to be installed unless you're installing a
"server" (and Fedora really doesn't offer that model anymore).

For quite a while, Fedora had installed an MTA and started it. By
default, it was configured to only listen to localhost on port 25 so
it was more-or-less innocuous. The fact that F19 stopped installing an
MTA by default caught a lot of people off guard.

Unlike others, however, I find the new system logging and analysis tools
cumbersome and painful to use. Having a program send an email to me if
it encounters issues is FAR superior to me having to plow through the
logs to see if it ran correctly or not.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks at alldigital.com -
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