Reasons for ikeeping an MTA (was Re: Ubuntu is under attack)

[Sam Morris]

Scott J. Henson wrote:
> Perhaps dbus would be the proper solution for this?  Isn't there a 
> notification icon when the kernel gets updated to tell the user that 
> they should probably reboot?  I would think something similar could be 
> used to notify the user about cron.  If I remember correctly(I'm at a
 > hoary system not a breezy system) its dbus and one could start from
 > something like ssmtp to provide the sendmail binaries.  Then instead
 > of  sending the message onto a mail relay, it could connect to the
 > local  user's session(if they are in the admin group) and tell them
 > about it. That would be the correct way of doing it I think.

What happens if the user isn't online when the message is sent? Will 
this mechanism take care of storing and queuing up the messages? What if 
they have two session open--which one gets the message? You will end up 
reinventing all the complexity of an MTA this way!

A unix system without an MTA configured for reliable (meaning that a 
message is delivered or bounced), mail delivery is broken. Since this is 
done (or was, apparently until Breezy came out) without any manual 
intervention, I don't understand the reasoning behind removing such an 
important piece of very basic system infrastructure.

-- 
Sam Morris
http://robots.org.uk/

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