Reasons for ikeeping an MTA

[Phillip Susi]

I agree that if you are going to get email, it should be important, and 
dangling man symlinks aren't really important.

I just noticed today that the server at work I have running ubuntu got 
postfix installed somehow... it may have been when I installed mysql.  I 
had no idea until today that my normal user on this server had a 100 MB 
mail spool in /var/mail.  This was mostly due to the output of my 
nightly backup script because I was having tar backup based on the 
mtime, and it was printing the name of every file that it did NOT back 
up because its mtime was old.

I guess if I had not noticed this, all this useless information would 
have just continued to fill up /var/mail.  That's not very good.  Also 
I'm wondering why all mail to root is being delivered to my normal user? 
  For that matter, why was it in /var/mail and not ~/Mail?  I seem to 
remember that being the place mail was delivered back in the day.

Anyhow, if an MTA is installed, I think there should be some kind of 
notification on the desktop when you get local email.  As it was it took 
me a while just to be able to read the mail.  I used to use pine back in 
the day, but that isn't available, so I finally installed mutt and gave 
it a try.  I also seem to remember that you'd periodically get a message 
on your tty when you had email, but this never happened either.

Scott J. Henson wrote:
> I concider myself an advanced user(I manage > 200 Ubuntu systems for a 
> university computer science department) and I regularly ignore these 
> emails on my desktop system at home.  I know they are there, but I don't 
> care cause I know that in the default install cron will never tell me 
> anything I really need to care about.  As for catostrophic events like 
> hard drive failures, I told mdadm( in /etc/default) to email my real 
> address and I installed smartd and told it to send the email to my real 
> address as well.  I would much rather both of these connect to my 
> session and tell me about it there as I'm more likely to see it faster.
> Also, whenever I build a system by hand for my personal use, I remove 
> postfix and install ssmtp cause I don't need a full mta installed and 
> running.  I manage a mail server at work, I don't need to be managing 
> one at home.  Please don't put postfix back in by default.  If Ubuntu 
> includes any mta, please make it something simple like ssmtp or esmtp.  
> I would much prefer a hacked ssmtp like I said above.  That or the 
> Ubuntu install should ask the user for an email address to send stuff 
> to.  I am sure a much greater proportion of users will never user, or 
> know hot to use, mailx or even care unless the message shows up in their 
> main account.  And if you are sending a message to a user's mail 
> account, please make sure it matters.  Dangling symlinks for some man 
> pages are not important.  The only reason my system should be emailing 
> me is to tell me its on fire or something equally dire.
> Id just like to point out that these are just my opinions and I don't 
> really expect Ubuntu to bow to them and do exactly what I am saying.  If 
> they don't I will simply customize my system and keep going without 
> losing any sleep about it.