Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 12, 2013 21:33 UTC (Mon) by cas (guest, #52554)
In reply to: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now by mjg59
Parent article: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

oh no! the sky is falling! an ISP that blocks smtp makes sending mail difficult. and it's all the MTA's fault.

this is even more contrived than the last example someone posted.

it's also a good example of why a local MTA is useful...you've got a lot more tricks up your sleeve to work around blockage with an MTA than you have with an MUA.

next up, "try to send mail from a laptop with a dead battery, during a power outage with no wifi or wired network available. you can't, see! and it's all the stupid MTA's fault".

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 12, 2013 21:40 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

The vast majority of residential ISPs block outgoing port 25 traffic, and those that don't will probably still be unable to deliver mail because their IP blocks will be in SORBS. This isn't a contrived example. This is the common case.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 12, 2013 21:53 UTC (Mon) by cas (guest, #52554) [Link] (3 responses)

and the user will have just as much (or more) difficulty configuring an MUA to work around the block.

stop pretending that this is the MTA's fault.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 12, 2013 22:00 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

This discussion started with you claiming "the whole point of having /usr/sbin/sendmail on a system (whether that's provided by sendmail, exim, postfix, ssmtpd or anything else) is that other programs don't have to know how to route or deliver mail, they just pipe it to /usr/sbin/sendmail." Perhaps that's how it should be - there are clear benefits to things being configured in one place, and there are clear benefits to not reimplementing SMTP dozens of times. But, unfortunately, that's not how it is. If you want to send mail, you can't depend on the sendmail command.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 12, 2013 22:37 UTC (Mon) by cas (guest, #52554) [Link] (1 responses)

and as i said several times previously, you can't depend on the MUA being configured or working either.

just saying "it's too hard" and giving up is not a solution.

to configure either an MUA or an MTA there's a certain minimum amount of knowledge and understanding (or at least facts, like the smarthost name or IP address) required.

the same questions will be asked of the user, and a useful answer required - whether that's asked in a dialog/whiptail popup, a GUI dialog, or a plain tty style.

also, some here seem to think that only a GUI or ncurses app is an MUA. or that only automated scripts, cron job need to send mail via command-line interface.

/usr/sbin/sendmail *IS* an MUA. as is /usr/bin/mail. I can use them to send useful information to any email address....and I can do it reliably and conveniently, with consistent and documented command-line options.

grep foobar /var/log/something.log | sendmail me@somewhere.example.com

that's using an MUA. if i want to get fancy, i can use other command-line tools to compress the log extract and send it as a properly formatted mime-attachment.

Fedora keeps sendmail — for now

Posted Aug 12, 2013 22:46 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

"and as i said several times previously, you can't depend on the MUA being configured or working either."

Yup. As a result, email's a poor default for reporting things, and so josh is trying to fix the fact that there are still things in Debian that default to logging via email. As you've demonstrated, it's easy to bridge from syslog to email if you know that your local configuration supports that.