Re: default MTA
Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> writes:
> What you propose requires:
> * adding desktop environment specific code to every facility that may need
> to send notifications
> * adding such notifications to every other desktop environment
> * coming up with a way to send such notifications remotely
> All of that is already solved by e-mail.
Except it's *not* solved by email because the email doesn't go anywhere
useful for many users. I'm a fairly sophisticated UNIX user and I have
still had failures that I didn't know about for months because I had some
problem with my nullmailer configuration, usually because I set it up once
and never thought to check it again when something about my upstream SMTP
server changed. I never read mail or see any local mail on most of my
systems; I only read mail from one place. And that's from someone who
knows enough to set up nullmailer and direct the mail somewhere hopefully
useful in the first place.
Add to that the authenticated SMTP problem (IMO, storing user passwords in
an unencrypted system configuration file is simply wrong from a security
standpoint and should never be done) and I really question whether email
notifications are this panacea that you perceive.
This is also not how any other end-user system works. If there's some
problem, the (quite reasonable) end user expectation is that the system
tells you via some more direct method.
Having email as an option is mandatory for servers and for sophisticated
users, but for a desktop configuration I agree that some other
notification method would be quite desirable and much better-suited to the
needs of the typical desktop user. It does need to have certain
properties that I'm not sure the current notifications have, such as
persistence until acknowledgement and the ability to handle cron errors,
but those seem like good things for us to work on.
> I wouldn't call important system messages not getting delivered a
> nonexistant problem -- this tends to end up with serious data loss.
That's exactly the point, and is why I would prefer not to write those
notifications into a file that no one ever looks at. (Which is why I
don't find sending them to syslog much more appealing, since the average
desktop user is never going to look there either.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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