Re: Lightweight Local Mail Solution

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

"Eli L." <eli@siliconsprawl.com> writes:
> I've been looking for a way to setup a local mail system to get email
> from services, mainly tripwire/other cron jobs, without running a full
> MTA.
>
> Since it's a laptop, it seemed unnecessary to run a full-fledged mail
> system for such a small task.
>
> Usually I use msmtp for outgoing mail; is there a way to configure the
> msmtp-mta package to also handle local mail?  (I haven't found any
> documents about how to do this)

Well, not in a way that I would trust, personally.  You can install it
as msmtp-mta and have it provide /usr/bin/sendmail, which is what
locally generated email *should* be using to submit the message.

This will only work online, though, which is a significant drawback.

Otherwise ...

> Am I completely off-base with this and should just use exim and not
> worry about it?

... you could use nullmailer, which does queue, but which is not LSB
compliant[1] but is otherwise excellent.

Otherwise, yes, just run a real MTA, in my view.  If it doesn't queue on
a laptop, which will be run offline at some point, then it isn't worth
bothering with at all.

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  It lacks the "sendmail started as SMTPD from inetd" command line
     option, which LSB mandates, despite the fact that it does not
     operate as an SMTP listener.