Re: Why not making /sbin/sendmail a mantadory component for mail operation?
On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 09:42 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Wed, 17 May 2006, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
[snip]
> 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.
The d-i people, or the m-t-a people? That's where you define what
kind of service you want.
You'd not just have to bluntly ask, but firmly recommend that they
install the m-t-a as a relay host. (Once a desktop user like me
figures out what a relayhost is, and that it won't hose me or make
my system an open spam relay, it's easy to do. Now all my outgoing
mail is relayed to smtp.myisp.net via postfix, but for 4 years of
using Linux, and 6 years of OS/2 & NT4 before that, it was the
traditional "put smtp.myisp.net in my MUA".)
Ignorance, fear of becoming an open relay and years of learning
will have to be overcome before Most Users will config Debian to
use a relayhost.
--
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Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson, LA USA
"Talk is cheap -- except when Congress does it."
Cullen Hightower
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