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

[Aigars Mahinovs]

On 12/20/05, Sam Morris <sam at robots.org.uk> wrote:
> 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.

I would have to agree to this - all *NIX system tools are designed
with some assumptions about the underlying system in mind.
Availability of working sendmail binary and that messages sent to
"root at localhost" will reach the administrator are two such
assumptions. It is not only cron - tools like tripwire, logcheck,
apt-listchanges and many others rely on this.

Instead of reimplementing the whole system it would be much more
effective to just continue the UNIX way: 1. install something like
nullmailer (or a proper buth light MTA) by default (so that at least
local mail is delivered), 2. make a way to get messages from
/var/mail/root to the administrator.

Do not interfere in cron or in the mail delivery process, because any
administrator of a network will want to (aand will expect to) make
"root" an alias pointing to his (remote) email and will expect
everything to just work without any more disturbance to local users.

--
Best regards,
    Aigars Mahinovs        mailto:aigarius at debian.org
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