Fedora keeps sendmail — for now [LWN.net]

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 13, 2013 8:48 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now by cas
Parent article: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

But that still leaves you out in the cold if your ISP wants you to submit mail to port 587 with TLS and SMTP AUTH. You will need to configure that manually – in a manner that depends on your specific MTA – after the installation.

The fact remains that ISP mail setups are diverse enough that any method of getting mail off the local machine – via a local MTA or an MUA – requires configuration. Instead of debating whether a system should come with a full-blown MTA like Sendmail by default, it would arguably be more productive to come up with a standardised scheme of representing ISP mail setups such that a user could be asked »What is your e-mail address (and possibly submission password)?« and the system could figure out automatically, for a reasonable majority of common ISPs, how to configure the local MTA or MUA of the user's choice to actually send mail using whatever access method that ISP supports, including goodies like encryption if it is available.

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Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 13, 2013 10:02 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

i don't think that you would find anyone who is opposed to such a tool being created.

Just the work of identifying the different types of access, enumerating them, and maintaining a list of per-ISP configs would be of immense value.

then configuring MTA or MUA software from that data would be much easier.

and by the way, as long as the actual work of configuring the MTA/MUA was modular and scriptable, this would also fit into the "Unix way" quite nicely :-)