How do you read your own e-mail? Do you pop it from somewhere to the local box, or do you use fetchmail or maildrop or one of their relatives to dump it into the local mail spool? Fetchmail and etc need a local MTA running because that's how they put mail into the spool. There's one reason. Another reason is that the mail system is usually how cron processes communicate with their owners. Since they run asynchronously, without a console, that's about the only way to get messages that might need a response back to someone who can deal with them. A log file is a poor substitute for this... you have to remember to go look at it. ^_^ As for connecting to it from outside... that's harmless enough. What does it matter? It's meant to be connected to from outside, so it's secure enough. On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 01:54:32PM -0400, Sunny Dubey wrote: > hey, > > why do most UNIX OS's ship with an MTA enabled in the default install?? > is there some [un]written rule of unix that I'm not aware of or something?? > > everytime I install debian, I always ponder why is exim being installed even > though I never seem to use it. (For as long as I've used debian, no one but > root has had mail delivered to them, and those were very rare, and very > unimportant.) > > Additionally, if the MTA is there for localhost reasons only, why can I > connect to it from another machine on the network?? > > thanks for any info > > Sunny Dubey > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org > > -- Marc Wilson mwilson@moonkingdom.net mwilson@cts.com
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