Lars Müller said the following on 12/09/2011 11:18 AM:
On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 10:56:46AM -0500, James Knott wrote:
Anton Aylward wrote:
I run fetchmail on a seperate machine, a mail hub, so this isn't going to be an issue for me until that gets upgraded.
But here are my thoughts.
Unlike my Fedora box, openSuse seems to want you to use Postix or ... what is it, 'exim'? Postfix since many, many, many years is the default MTA.
All the remaining stuff is either legacy (sendmail) or community driven (exim).
As both exim and postfix offer a sendmail compatible commandline interface who cares?
While that's true, it makes many assumptions that aren't valid in all situations. More specifically, they aren't valid in *MY* situation. So here's my LAN with a mail hub. The mail hub runs Postfix and SpamAssassin and Dovecot. (There's AV and sanitizer in there somewhere too but never mind.) All are well configured and reliable. There there are workstations. Workstations tend to be minimalist where possible. Not quite "thin clients", but .... (In theory they could PXE boot W/XP, but that's another matter) Their Syslog writes to the Syslog server, for example. So they don't need large /var file systems. They *ALL* use the mail hub. They *ALL* use Thunderbird, and Thunderbird is configured to read mail from the Dovecot IMAP server on the mail hub and send outgoing mail to the Postfix server on the mail hub.
From the user's point of view there is no mail handling on the workstation, its all done on the mail hub.
But some legacy software under Linux still wants to report via mail. That's OK. The workstations have no need for a sophisticated MTA. All they need is a minimalist shim invoked as 'sendmail' that punts the mail over to the mail hub. Yes, postfix and exim can do that, but they are about 10^4 times the size required. There is not need for routing - its hard coded; no need for all the sophistication that any of the classical MTAs supply. Its a shim, a pipe. It could be done with a small script, perl, python, , whatever, if you have those binaries running anyway. All they have to do is to be able to be invoked as /usr/bin/sendmail and punt the mail over to the mail hub. Not complicated. I choose to use the esmtp package. Yes it no longer being developed. That's because there's not much to it. Its minimalist and only needs one line of config: hostname = mailhub:25 Postfix is great. I love Postfix. I just don't want to have to install and configure and debug it on all machines, all thin clients, all PXE boots, all virtual machines. For many home users, even those not running their own mailhub, Postfix is still massive overkill. Their ISP acts as a mail hub - they *have* to proxy all mail there as the ISPs anti-spam measure won't let them send directly to arbitrary mail servers on the 'Net, and they read their mail from mailboxes supplied by the ISP or at Gmail or similar, and so don't have incoming mail to their machine. So Postfix is an unnecessary overhead. Not everyone has the same needs. -- The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org