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Fedora keeps sendmail — for nowFedora keeps sendmail — for nowPosted Aug 12, 2013 1:51 UTC (Mon) by cas (subscriber, #52554)In reply to: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now by Cyberax Parent article: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now
1. sending mail from a public wifi is a special case that needs to be authenticated - nobody sane allows mail clients to connect and send from outside their network without authentication.
2. the reason why that can be tricky to implement is not because the configuration is difficult but because of 1. above - nobody sane lets external clients relay through them without authentication.
3. given that it's a special case that needs special configuration, the best place to configure it is *once* in the local system MTA and **NOT** multiple times in every app or script that needs to send mail.
4. as i mentioned in a previous post, the calibre application is an excellent example of exactly why sending and queuing mail should not be left to application developers who clearly do not understand how mail works. calibre's author is an expert in ebook formats - unfortunately, he thinks that makes him an expert in everything else (including smtp and security and GUI design, all of which he is atrocious at).
even more unfortunately, it's only one of many examples - and removal of a standard tool (/usr/sbin/sendmail) would only encourage proliferation of crappy, sub-standard, poorly-understood smtp implementations by people who have no idea what they're doing.
it's classic programmers NIH disease - rather than take the time to understand and make use of an existing system tool, they'll reinvent a half-arsed incomplete and shoddy implementation of it....and then refuse to see why it's a terrible idea for every other program to do the same.
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Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 1:56 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
> 1. sending mail from a public wifi is a special case that needs to be authenticated - nobody sane allows mail clients to connect and send from outside their network without authentication.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? This is NOT a special case! That's about as mundane use-case as it gets.
Ok, I get it. You don't even have an idea how people actually use their computers.
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 2:10 UTC (Mon) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link]
no, it's just that i think - actually, *know* - that sending mail from a starbucks wifi connection is only a tiny subset of what people do with their computers.
optimising for that one special case is, to put it bluntly, FITH.
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 2:22 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
I made a test on my home Internet connection. Same result.
Or do you argue that home users are just a filth that doesn't merit attention of developers? Maybe we should care only about 'serious' users?
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 11:10 UTC (Mon) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link]
mmmm yum. i love the taste of strawman
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 11:14 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
So care to answer?
A significant majority of home users simply can not send email using plain SMTP. What are you proposing to do?
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 2:35 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Systems privileged to act as mail servers, running on an IP that's not blacklisted, on a network that allows outbound unencrypted SMTP to random MXes, and maintained well enough to actually maintain reasonable deliverability metrics, are the vanishingly small special case compared to end-user client systems. Maintaining such a system requires non-trivial expertise. Congratulations, it sounds like you have it. Don't assume every random end-user does; it's far easier to tell your MUA "my mail server is over there".
Every single person I know who maintains a mail server on their personal system has had at least one incident where they either lost mail or had it delayed for days stuck in a mail queue somewhere. Life's too short. If you want to run your own mail server, please go right ahead; nobody is stopping you. However, many Linux distributions are trying to optimize for user-friendliness these days, not just flexibility and applicability to every possible use case. (See also http://islinuxaboutchoice.com/ .)
Fedora keeps sendmail — for now Posted Aug 12, 2013 11:33 UTC (Mon) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link]
> it's far easier to tell your MUA "my mail server is over there".
it's nowhere near as difficult as you are pretending it is.
it's far easier to tell your MTA *once only* "my smarthost is there", than to have to configure the same information in every program that needs it - and then to re-configure them all when you change ISP or mail provider. or when you realise you need to handle work mail differently to personal mail.
> However, many Linux distributions are trying to optimize for
the mistake you and your ilk are maing is assuming that "user-friendly" equals "crippled and dumbed-down". it's the same mistake microsoft made in the 80s...that apple managed to avoid until the late 90s.
if you want a system like that, there are several available - you don't need to turn linux into a clone of mac or windows. OS X is actually a pretty good system.
really, if you hate unix or linux that much, why do you even try to use it? use something else that suits your needs better instead of trying to ruin the things about linux that make it good.
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