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

Matthew Garrett mjg at redhat.com
Tue Oct 21 17:20:45 UTC 2008


On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:10:37AM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >Local delivery of mail is a poor solution, since it provides no 
> >indication of priority difference between "You've got spam" and "Your 
> >hard drive is failing". 
> 
> That's a solvable problem within the context of email, whereas starting 
> from scratch and re-inventing delivery to arbitrary user-selectable 
> endpoints is somewhat insane.

I'm sure the anti-spam companies would be delighted to hear it. Yes, 
it's a solvable problem - but you're conflating two things, important 
system updates and personal email. I think trying to present these two 
quite different things in the same way is a bad idea.

> >If there's nobody to present it to, it can be 
> >queued and presented at login - if the user is running on their system 
> >but doesn't have the desktop infrastructure running, then by definition 
> >they're already outside the standard desktop usecase.
> 
> Does that mean their system should die with no attempt at notification? 
>  Or that desktop administration should be confusingly different than 
> standard systems?

I'm reasonably sure that I didn't suggest that, no.

> >I'm not arguing about the utility of an MTA for various situations. I'm 
> >arguing that for one specific and very common situation, using an MTA to 
> >deliver system alerts is a poor way of handling it. We should fix that. 
> 
> No, you should fix it so mail delivery is useful.

And then have to modify every single MUA so it automatically flags 
high-priority system information. I'm not convinced getting that into 
gmail is going to happen.

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




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