Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

Chris Tyler chris at tylers.info
Fri Sep 5 14:13:03 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 09:01 -0500, Mike Cronenworth wrote:
> > I like being able to assume basic outbound MTA functionality is present,
> > so imho having sendmail there by default is a Good Thing. (But yeah, no
> > one reads root's mail. Maybe firstboot should give the option -- enabled
> > by default -- to redirect root's mail to the first user created (or
> > another address of the user's choice) via /etc/aliases).
> 
> Outbound MTAs on a local user's system are essentially useless in 
> today's Internet. All major e-mail domains have spam filters 
> specifically blocking dynamic IPs and most Fedora users have dynamic IP 
> addresses, or in some non-US countries proxy IP addresses, even worse. 
> The solution would be to configure sendmail to relay through your ISPs 
> mail server, but who is going to do that. No one.

(a) With sendmail there, you have a chance of being able to send
outbound e-mail. You may need to adjust the configuration depending on
the network.

(b) Without sendmail or another MTA there, there is zero chance of being
able to send outbound e-mail without doing configuration.

So I suppose the question is "what percentage of systems in (a) can send
outbound e-mail without further MTA configuration?" -- if this
approaches 0, then a==b, and sendmail should be disabled by default. I
don't think that's the case; sendmail can definitely send mail to the
LAN, and there are a fair number of cases where sending beyond the LAN
will work too (those with static IPs, those on a corporate or university
network, ...)

-Chris




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