Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Mike Cronenworth]

-------- Original Message  --------
Subject: Re: Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail
From: Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com>
To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora. 
<fedora-list at redhat.com>
Date: 09/05/2008 09:56 AM

> The rules are for incoming port 25 connections, not outgoing port 25
> connections. The port on the local machine for the outgoing
> connection is not going to be port 25. As far as changing the
> firewall to allow incoming port 25 connections, it is a checkbox on
> the default firewall GUI that will open the connection. If your ISP
> is not blocking outgoing port 25 connections, except to their mail
> server, the stock setup of Sendmail will send mail to the Internet.
> It takes a bit more configuration to use your ISPs mail server, but
> not much.
> 

You're nitpicking unnecessarily. I know fully well that the incoming 
port needs to be opening, which is why I stated it as a point against 
default sendmail startup. No regular desktop Fedora user will even 
thinkg about su'ing, vi'ing, or even consider needing an MTA. They'll 
open up Evolution or Thunderbird to send an e-mail.

Example: Your User-Agent shows you used Thunderbird to reply to my mail 
and it travelled through a route that never included using sendmail. You 
arn't even using it yourself.

> If you have a mail server on your LAN, you can configure Sendmail to
> use it without much trouble. It is also not that hard to configure
> Sendmail to accept incoming connections. All it takes is editing or
> removing one line, and regenerating the config file. Or if you are
> brave, you can edit the config file directly. The change is fairly easy.

Why would a user who installed using the default Fedora method need to 
do this? No one has given me an example. Just the fact that you can do 
it, which I already knew.

P.S. Future responders can skip treating me like I just installed 
Fedora. You're talking to an individual who has years of Unix 
experience. I know what MTAs are for, what uses them, rules of jobs, 
etc., etc. Please look at my original question from the standpoint of a 
*default* Fedora install. What do sendmail and atd do for a default 
Fedora install? In fact, what do they even do for other packages? I am 
not asking this for my own benefit, but for the benefit of a regular 
Fedora user. If you require their service you will know yourself and 
have to configure and startup (chkconfig or whatever suits you) those 
services. Don't use the "Just Because" clause.