Re: Why need an MTA in the defualt install ??
On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 01:54:32PM -0400, Sunny Dubey wrote:
| hey,
|
| why do most UNIX OS's ship with an MTA enabled in the default install??
| is there some [un]written rule of unix that I'm not aware of or something??
Daemon type programs (such as cron) notify the admin of errors via
email. Since the program is not run directly by the admin from a
shell printing to stdout is useless.
| everytime I install debian, I always ponder why is exim being installed even
| though I never seem to use it. (For as long as I've used debian, no one but
| root has had mail delivered to them, and those were very rare, and very
| unimportant.)
root should never get mail, since you should not login as root to read
mail. Instead the user names of the admin(s) should be specified in
/etc/aliases so that they get the mail that was addressed to root.
| Additionally, if the MTA is there for localhost reasons only, why can I
| connect to it from another machine on the network??
I guess it listens to port 25 (SMTP) by default. This can surely be
disabled, or firewall rules can be added so connections to that port
are ignored.
HTH,
-D
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