Re: Please participate in popularity-contest
* Tore Anderson
> Furthermore, last I checked the Sarge installer (beta 4, IIRC) the
> MTA was for some reason not capable of sending email to remote
> destinations. Enabling the poularity contest would just result in a
> cascade of bounces with the message «Mailing to remote domains not
> supported».
* Andreas Metzler
> exim4's default is local-delivery only, because it is the only sane
> default.
So, er, the only sane default is «not working»? I must admit I disagree
with you there.. What is the rationale for that?
Anyway, to see if you or I am the odd man out here :-) , I tested the
packages that are providing mail-transport-agent to see if they worked
with only their default configuration. My Debconf priority is set
to "high" - and the packages was installed by just hitting enter whenever
I was asked something, and finally send an email to a remote address
and see if it arrived.
Results:
postfix, courier-mta: Worked without requiring any interaction.
exim (v3): Worked fine, but insisted on me entering the account
rootmail should be forwarded to.
sendmail: Worked fine, but I had explicitly say that I wanted to
configure it.
smail: Insisted on me specifying smarthost (I entered "none") and
an alias for rootmail just like exim. After that, it sent mail
just fine.
xmail: Didn't provide /usr/lib/sendmail (policy violation?), but
mail sent via 'nc localhost smtp' arrived to the remote
destination as expected.
emtp-run: Did not work, probably due to its nature - it requires
a mail relay to function as far as I understand.
nullmailer, ssmtp: Worked, though that was probably just luck -
they seem to require an smtp relay just like esmtp-run, but
guessed mail.`dnsdomainname` in the default configuration which
happens to work here.
masqmail: Didn't work, says "not online" in its log. Given the
package description I think that it is possibly due to its
nature, and that if I were able to signal to it that "I am
online now" somehow, it could possibly be working.
zmailer: Didn't work, don't know why - there wasn't any logs or
obvious error messages that I can see.
exim4-daemon-*: Doesn't work - intentionally so as you said.
So it seems to me that most the other MTA's try to provide a working
default configuration to the extent possible. What's so special
about Exim (v4, to be specific), that makes it undesireable/impossible
to ship a working configuration as the default?
In my opinion a sane default setting for a fully-flegded MTA like
Exim would be to ask if the user had any specific SMTP submission service
at his ISP or wherever he'd like to use, and if not - mail is sent
directly using DNS/SMTP. YMMV.
> During installation you'll be given the opprtunity to select a different
> setup of course.
Of course, I can make Exim do all kinds of stuff if I set my mind to it.
It is the default settings I care about, the one the user get after
having done a pinky-finger installation - in my opinion they should,
whenever possible, provide a working setup. Currently they don't, and
sadly probably won't do so for Sarge either, unless the d-i crew
overrides the default setting.
Kind regards,
--
Tore Anderson
Reply to: