Why not making /sbin/sendmail a mantadory component for mail operation?
On Wed, 17 May 2006, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> which results in "smtphost bugs.debian.org" in the conffile. Maybe the
> default to the MTA question could be "N" instead.
An open outgoing port 25 is commonly blocked by default anywhere you have
non-incompetent network management, unless you are on the business of
selling full internet uplinks for server hosting, or you do business with
spammers.
Sometimes I feel we are abandoning the true spirit of an Unix system. If
Debian made sure to always have a local MTA that is properly configured to
send email (and it can be a simple SMTP with no queue thing, too. It can
work just as well and can be as safe as a full-blown MTA, the drawback is
that the user has to wait for the email to be delivered to a queueing MTA
before the sendmail command returns), everything could be made to just work.
What exactly is the problem with making a local MTA absolutely mandatory,
(as in anything that sends email either recommends or depends on
mail-transport-agent)?
Of course, at the same time we would have to make sure stuff like nbsmtp,
nullmailer, esmtp-run or ssmtp is trivially easy to install, and point our
users to those packages so that they know the possiblity exists. IMHO we
really ought to leverage d-i to bluntly ask the user if he wants a
full-blown MTA or just a SMTP relay (obviously by using easier terms, like a
"Advanced outgoing mail service" (i.e. exim) task, which if not selected,
gives you nullmailer or somesuch.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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