Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 01:21 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
>> Are there any legitimate reasons why the "atd" and "sendmail" services 
>> are enabled by default? A "default" install is for a desktop and they 
>> are quite useless in that regard.
>>
>> Sendmail only stores the logwatch output, which actually accumulates 
>> after a period of time because no normal desktop user reads the mail. It 
>> could possibly fill up a hard drive on a small drive, such as a eeePC 
>> 4gb system. I realize we all have terrabyte hard drives now and logwatch 
>> is only kilobytes in size, but it's still garbage. Don't get me wrong, I 
>> use logwatch mail on Fedora server installs, but for a desktop user... 
>> who never reads it...
>>
>> As for 'at' well... do *normal* Fedora users have any benefit from this 
>> starting up? I realize there is a gnome-schedule utility, but it is not 
>> installed by default.
>>
>> I'm not trying to start a flamewar. I am just curious.
> 
> +1. I haven't used sendmail in over 5 years and have to keep remembering
> to turn the damn thing off (servers run postfix, clients talk to port 25
> directly).
> 

Turn the sendmail service off, then send yourself a couple of mails:

echo lala | mail -s "test" root

Then check /var/spool/clientmqueue/. These messages appear to be on your 
system anyway.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip