Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 15:26 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> To return to the OPs desire for the sendmail service not to run,
> it seems to me that there are three scenarios where this might make
> sense.
[...]
> The second scenario, which I imagine is becoming more prevalent,
> would be a home system with a server serving a number of laptops.
> It is my impression that there are a number of places
> where email is used in such a case to communicate between the
> machines.

You might run an MTA on the server. Running it on the clients is
probably overkill.

> I'm not sure if sendmail is normally used in these cases.
> 
> The third case is there there is a single machine
> collecting email by POP or IMAP and sending email by "direct SMTP",
> as you have explained.
> I guess in this case it makes sense to turn off sendmail,
> though on the other hand I can't see any harm in leaving it running.

BTW I think I said earlier that I accepted the need for sendmail because
some other stuff assumes it exists. I should have said that the other
stuff assumes the sendmail *program* is available, but it doesn't assume
there is a sendmail *daemon* actually running. AFAIK you could just turn
it off. It's not consuming significant resources so it's not a big deal,
but from a security standpoint it's good practice not to run stuff you
don't need.

poc