How to SMTP (Email) Server Fedora 6?

[Les Mikesell]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:

>>> It is also reasonable for a machine to only need to deliver locally
>>> generated mail.
>> It wouldn't be much fun if all machines did that.
>>
> But that doesn't change the fact that it is reasonable for some
> machines. Or are you saying that because some machines need to
> receive mail from the outside, that by default all machines should
> be configured to receive outside mail?

I'm saying that because we know some machines will need to accept 
network email - or it won't work for anyone - a general purpose 
distribution should make that as easy to set up as any other service.

> Why should my laptop accept
> incoming mail when it does not have a valid domain name, or a fixed
> IP address? 

Why should any option you don't need this minute be there?  Why should 
the distribution work on more than laptops?  Why single out sendmail here?

> It would be interesting to what percentage of machines running Linux
> actually need to be configured to accept incoming mail connections
> from the outside.

Why is that more interesting than the percentage that have SATA drives? 
Or any other thing that a general-purpose distro should handle but not 
everyone wants?

 > Granted, most
> servers are going to need to be able to send mail someplace, but
> only machines that are a mail server are going to need to accept
> incoming connections, and not being able to accept incoming mail
> connections by default is what you are complaining about, right?

There is a reasonable topology where a mail gateway accepts mail for a 
domain and relays directly to the user's workstation for delivery.  A 
general purpose distribution should be able to participate in this with 
every user's machine accepting his own mail.

> Now, if you were arguing that Sendmail should not be the default
> mail server, then I could maybe see having the default Sendmail
> configuration accept incoming mail connections. Realistically, most
> machines probably do not need most of the features of Sendmail.

Most machines don't need most of the features of the kernel.  That 
doesn't mean some arbitrary set should be broken - or that you should 
have to edit obscure configurations and rebuild for fairly common 
operations.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com