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Re: question about sending mail and postfix - slightly OT question



Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. on 19/01/10 17:53, wrote:
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 04:54:57 Adam Hardy wrote:
Paul E Condon on 19/01/10 06:14, wrote:
On 20100118_133220, Adam Hardy wrote:
I have a new server online with lenny that I want to configure to
send all its mail for root to my email address, and that's all. I
don't want it to receive any email or relay or anything else.

I am running into the problem that the mail
command isn't installed. It obviously doesn't come with postfix and
there appears to be a huge choice of packages that I could choose
from in the debian repositories, but isn't there a default?

I don't think the end-user mail command is installed by default. A fairly stripped-down Lenny would still include a sendmail work-alike, usually exim4-
daemon-light.

On my system, I am getting the mail command from the bsd-mailx package:
bss@rei:/etc/alternatives% ls -l $(which mail)
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-02-15 17:41 /usr/bin/mail -> /etc/alternatives/mail
bss@rei:/etc/alternatives% ls -l /etc/alternatives/mail
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2009-02-15 17:41 /etc/alternatives/mail -> /usr/bin/bsd-mailx
bss@rei:/etc/alternatives% ls -l /usr/bin/bsd-mailx
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 91192 2008-04-27 12:20 /usr/bin/bsd-mailx
bss@rei:/etc/alternatives% dpkg -S /usr/bin/bsd-mailx
bsd-mailx: /usr/bin/bsd-mailx

The "mail" utility has been marked as "LEGACY" in the UNIX standards for over a decade. The documentation of the legacy command indicates that "Applications should migrate to the mailx utility". IMO, Users should probably migrate to a better local mail agent, mutt is a start, but you should look at the packages to provide the "mail-reader" virtual. Also, there's a "mailx" package in Lenny, but it is also provided by 3 other packages. One of those is bsd-mailx, but the others might be just as capable.


In mailutils package, there are both mail and mailx.

Regards
Adam


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