None of the Above (was Re: Sendmail still default?)

[Thomas Woerner]

What about this (maybe silly) idea:

The default desktop installation is not providing a mta like sendmail, 
postfix or exim. A tiny local program is using syslog to collect local 
emails in a file in /var/log in mailbox format. This way emails e.g. 
from cron or mdadm are not lost and a local email reader could be used 
to read the emails. Additionally logrotate would help to keep the amount 
of emails at an acceptable level. SELinux shouldn't be a problem for 
this solution.

A symlink to /var/spool/mail would be nice, but I think that SELinux 
does not like this at all.

If a user needs fetchmail or a real mta, he has to install sendmail, 
postfix or exim. fetchmail could have a requirement for MTA.

What do you think?

Ciao,
Thomas

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 10:51 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>> Also filtering mail on MUA startup is just trainwreak recipe.
>> If you want your MUA to start fast you need to pre-filter junk mail in
>> the background (no not everyone uses gmail and gmail is not perfect
>> anyway).
>>
>> So far, I haven't seen anything beating fetchmail + local MTA +
>> server-side filters + local imap or local maildir delivery in Fedora.
> 
> But if you're using fetchmail, it's too late to filter -- because you
> should be rejecting the stuff you don't want at SMTP time.
> 
> Filtering wants to be done on the _real_ mail server that accepts
> incoming mail. Doing it after fetchmail is almost as bad as doing it in
> the MUA.
> 


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Thomas Woerner
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