Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Every device on the Internet, including Fedora devices, is not actually an MTA by default, so why should we pretend? Only devices set up to be mail servers, by ISPs, companies and webmail providers, who require authenticated submission for relaying, actually speak server-to-server SMTP.

Pretty much every mail client already speaks SMTP and doesn't use /usr/sbin/sendmail and it has been that way for decades, they will also hold mail in an Outbox so aren't reliant on the local MTA for queueing. This is not just GUI clients like Evolution, KMail or Thunderbird but also PINE and mutt speak SMTP. Only crazy people are still using mailx as their day-to-day MUA 8-)

Also, local delivery to /var/lib/mail is bad for the default system because only a few utilities like mailx still can read from there, and most messages are destined to users who don't interactively log in at all. Those messages disappear down a black hole and we would all be better served if they went to syslog by default. Of course if you want cron mail, install ssmtp and configure it to go to your central mail hub.

This isn't to say that /usr/sbin/sendmail isn't an API for scripts and programs to send mail, but that is a small case which doesn't _require_ a full MTA such as sendmail or postfix, a small shim like ssmtp is more appropriate, and should be listed as a dependency for programs which require it.