Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)
On May 31, 2017 2:38:51 PM EDT, Nicholas D Steeves <nsteeves@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Maybe exim should easily provide or default to authenticated smarthost
>(satellite) configuration and /etc/aliases should be configured to
>forward system mail somewhere else (eg: the sysadmin's work email, in
>case of SMART or md errors)?
I believe exim used to ask, via debconf, the user to configure email and that was one of the options (not sure if the debconf prompts would set up authentication for you, or if you had to edit one trial format config file as well). But the priority of those questions was lowered so now by default you're left without configured email.
That did reduce the number of questions asked for the default install—a worthwhile goal, I think.
I don't think there is any way to configure mail to go to a non-local sysadmin email account without asking questions, unfortunately. Some of those questions are going to be confusing ("what is a smarthost? Sender rewriting?") or problematic (if you're installing on your primary computer, do you have email username and password readily available? what if it's Gmail, and you now need to go set up an app-specific password, or turn on SMTP? Hard to do from the installer.)
Once you've got the system up, though, dpkg-reconfigure -plow exim4-config ought to get it set up.
PS: there have been many discussions about changing the default MTA or dumping it all together on -devel.
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