Matthew Forrester wrote: > I always thought the installation of EXIM by default was rather strange, > If you want a mail server your almost certainly going to want a specific > mail server, Perhaps that is true. For example I prefer to install postfix. Therefore the install of exim also means I need to dpkg --purge exim after installing postfix to remove the vestigial cron exim script script. Otherwise the syslog is noisy. So it would certainly be more convenient to allow MTA selection prior to the first installation. But it is hardly a big deal since you install Debian only once. > and after all your only going to want one per network. Excuse me? Perhaps for you. But to me it sounds absurd that there will only be one MTA per network! Even if there are no users on a machine then errors from cron or other processes are forwarded by smtp to centralized admin machines. That would be true even if the "typical" user were a pop user. True even on a kiosk machine. > A sensible Idea would be to have nullmailer installed. none of my > debian using friends knew about nullmailer, but were well chuffed > when i told them about it, as they could get rid of the mta on there > workstations (which serves no other purpose except a potential > security problem, use of hdd space and stopping apt complaining > about not having an mta). It is true that a low end thin client that never cares about any mail forwarding (including errors and other administrative mail) can probably do without an MTA. If you are willing to discard the mail because you have made the decision to do so. Those sound like toy hobby machines. Which are valid and perhaps a fine candidate for nullmailer. But certainly nullmailer is not a valid candidate for the default installation. Bob
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