<mail> command missing?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 08:10:20PM -0800, Mike Bird wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-12-17 at 19:57, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> > There has been discussions about how to do with
> > Mail ever since the spring, with the aim to apply the changes for
> > Breezy.   I suspect the root of mailx not being installed by default
> > comes from these discussions.  See for example this spec from UDU in
> > April:
> >   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MailRoadmap
> 
> That discussion, initiated by MattZimmerman, proposed switching
> from Exim to Postfix, standardising on Maildir format in a
> non-standard but sensible ~/.maildir directory, and eventually
> making all mail apps automagically work together when installed.
> All excellent points.
> 
> If there's an official explanation for dumping Postfix and Mailx I
> haven't found it yet.

Dropping mailx was a side effect of having no MTA (/usr/sbin/sendmail) in
the default installation, as mailx requires this in order to send mail.

It was decided not to have an MTA in the desktop install for at least the
following reasons that I recall:

- Many systems do not require Unix-style mail
- One fewer daemon processes in the desktop install
- Postfix had to be crippled by default in order to meet security
  requirements (not listen on the network), which was awkward for users who
  actually wanted to use Postfix as a mail server

-- 
 - mdz