Re: Mutt dependency on an MTA
Pine can do quite well with the MTA on a remote machine as well (simply
set the smtp server in setup/config), so let's not throw this on Messenger
only, real MUAs have the capability to check POP/IMAP mail without a local
copy of a MTA as well. IIRC you could use elm to check POP mail without a
local MTA (I remember screwing up sendmail to the point of failure once
and still checking my POP mail via elm, which was kinda stupid, because I
had a couple of messages I really would've rather kept so should've waited
to check my POPmail until I rebuilt the system :( ). As for a MUA that
doesn't require a MTA not being a useful solution for many users, look at
the popularity of fetchmail, a MTA that is mostly for grabbing POP mail:
wouldn't it be a more elegant solution to simply remove all MTAs from the
system and use a MUA that has POP/IMAP retrieval capabilities in that
particular case? Installing something for a portion of it's usefulness is
NEVER an elegant solution, in fact, I'd call it a kludge offhand. There
ARE MUAs that need no local MTA to do the job they're installed for, so
why force users into installing a package that might never see use at
all--sounds like the MUA really didn't depend on the MTA at all, doesn't
it? Sounds to me like to the user in question got the "significant amount
of functionality" without the dependency, giving the Depends field the
lie. I never used mutt much, so can't say for sure if it can use a remote
host's MTA and POP/IMAP, but if it can, then it can function without a
MTA, so the dependency should therefore be reclassified.
On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 1999 at 08:06:51PM +0100, robbie@scot-mur.demon.co.uk wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 26, 1999 at 12:27:57PM -0500, Stephen Pitts wrote:
> > > It still needs an MTA to send mail :-)
> > Not necessarily on the same machine. Imho no mua should bepend on amta,
> > just recommend. Dselect will make you install recommends anyway, but
> > apt-get doesn't.(I think)
>
> Perhaps you're thinking of netscape, which can deliver mail itself
> to remote SMTP servers. Most unix mail programs do not (and should not).
> As to making MUAs not require MTAs, I suspect approximately 0.0000001%
> of our users would like to do this.
>
> Hamish
> --
> Hamish Moffatt VK3SB (ex-VK3TYD).
> CCs of replies from mailing lists are welcome.
>
>
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