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

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 11:48:08AM -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:

> Some have said that we don't need an MTA _just_ for cron, but the fact is
> that cron is one specific app that _is_ installed and needs to be able to
> send mail.  Any app that needs to send mail also needs to either force a
> dependency on _an_ MTA or have an alternative method of notifying a user. 
> The real error here is that cron can be installed in such a way that it
> _doesn't_ provide any notification.  If that's fixed in a way that doesn't
> involve an MTA some people are going to be annoyed, but it would at least
> be consistent.

Right. So the real issue here isn't there's a missing MTA, but that 
notification isn't happening. For a desktop system, an MTA-based setup 
is actually a pretty poor solution. Without the user setting up a 
.forward or configuring their mail client to read the local spool, then 
they won't receive any notification. Integrating this into some sort of 
notification applet would seem a better idea.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org