Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

A very reasonable point, but you've got it flipped around. If the user wants to run a mail client, the mail client is the thing to configure. And given the choice of configuring the mail client to talk to the user's mail server via SMTP, or configuring a local mail server to use the user's mail server and configuring the mail client to talk to that local mail server, the former ends up with far less configuration.

On top of that, with the former setup, when the user's mail client says a mail is sent, it's *actually sent*, rather than potentially sitting in a mail queue on the user's system where it might get lost without the user knowing. Not every user wants to be a mail server admin.

>> Meanwhile, mail applications still need to know how to speak
>> various mail protocols because individual user requirements
>> don't necessarily match the global system configuration

> first you argue that the MTA might not be configured correctly, and then you say that it's OK for it to be misconfigured

You've entirely missed the point of the statement you replied to. There may not be *any* valid system configuration for an MTA. The smarthost each user uses for their own mail is not necessarily suitable for use in the system configuration, either because the user may not want the system sending automated mail as them, or because the user doesn't want to store the credentials for their mail account systemwide. That's not a misconfigured MTA, that's a system where all the user's have their own mail server already and it doesn't live on the local system. If you want to argue that a user's *session* should include something similar to an MTA, that's an interesting idea, but that doesn't mean a systemwide MTA makes sense on systems that aren't the mail server for a given domain.