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

[Les Mikesell]

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.

I think it is a bad idea for you to decide which of those things is more 
important to me or anyone else, or where I want them delivered.  Just 
supply the tools, please, with some convenient default setting so the 
system messages are available.

>>> 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.

If you don't use email, you will have to invent something new that will 
almost certainly be less capable and less useful.

>>> 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.

No, you don't have to modify every MUA.  You just have to let people use 
the one they have had years to tune to their liking already.  And supply 
some reasonable default for the one or two users you might pick up that 
don't already have a preference or an assortment of accounts already 
created for different priority messages.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com