On 04/22/2007 02:44 PM somebody named Carlos E. R. wrote:
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The Sunday 2007-04-22 at 11:07 -0400, ken wrote:
Yes, it does warrant an MTA, because it is simpler. Linux/unix are made up of many programs that do specialized tasks well and safely. Sending email is the job of the MTA, and it doesn't mean you would be setting up a full fledged mail server. In fact, it won't be a mail server as it won't be capable of receiving (external) mail. Carlos,
First, "simpler" is a subjective term and situational. What is simpler for one person or in one situation might not be simpler for another person or in another situation. And generally it isn't of pivotal importance how simple a technology is. A more important consideration is how appropriate a technology is to the situation. There's at least one other consideration which overrides both of these. But that's an off-list topic.
It is simpler to use the command line "mail" coupled with a local mta to send email. I would have that running in minutes, probably. I call that simpler. :-)
True, it would take no time at all for me to point-and-click my way through a Yast install, but there's generally some tweaking of config files needed. I already had nail installed; the challenge was just setting up the config file properly. The more difficult part is setting up the SSL encryption. This would require configuring saslauthd also. As said previously, the version of nail/mailx packaged with my suse distribution didn't do this either, so I had to download and compile a more recent version. This took only a couple minutes.
Not the only way, agreed.
And it's always good to know more than one way to accomplish something.
And, yes, generally speaking, and depending upon the definition we give to "MTA", an MTA is commonly necessary to deliver mail. But much depends on how we define "MTA". Mutt, for example, has-- let's just call it "code"-- which delivers email to a remote mail server and which its documentation insists is *not* an MTA. Emacs also has its own code for delivering email to a remote mail server. Nail and sylpheed and pine too. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure that Thunderbird does as well. And there may very well be others I don't know about which don't require a postfix daemon to send an email.
Yes, many or all GUI type mail programs (MUAs) will have at least some capacity to talk to an smtp server (aka mail server, incorrectly), but only a few can do that from the command line. Pine will send, true, but from the command line it leaves you inside the editor. I'm not aware if it can send directly from the command line with no intervention.
It can. At least it could in an earlier version. I recall helping a coworker to get it working several years ago. As said, mutt and nail and emacs can all send a mail from a CLI.
And all of them I know will balk out at the first failure, whereas a daemon will keep trying for days, freeing the script or program that dispatched the email. ....
True, but if this one email per day fails for some reason, I want to know about it immediately after the first failed attempt.
You may get it running, but it is a solution I wouldn't use for automatic dispatch: I wouldn't consider it reliable nor traceable (no logs). I wouldn't trust it.
Okay. But it's my own script, so nobody but me is going to know how reliable it is. And (though I'm not doing it in this app) *any* event can be logged. You just put the appropriate line into your code and configure syslogd to handle it.
And as all SuSE Linux systems come with an MTA readily installed, I don't see a good reason not to use it.
I think we already agree that there's no necessity either way. So it's a matter of preference. And all other things being equal, I prefer to have one less possible point of failure. I've done postfix a few times previously and I'm sure I'll do it again before too long. If I need help with it, I'll call on you.
And this very last part is what I was originally asking about. Talking about theory, mail servers, cron error reporting, and general systems administration is fine. But all these are a bit off-topic from my original question. Repeating my original request again here would suggest more optimism on my part than is warranted, so I'll just say I appreciate by all your replies and especially thank the one guy who provided the information about mutt.
Yes, we know and understood your question, but we don't use nor like the solution you want. As we haven't done it that way previously, we can not tell you exactly how to do it in such a way. I think it is possible to get it done with "nail", but I would have to study the manual and test it... so you'd better study it yourself than me, don't you think? ;-) Maybe they have a mail list or a FAQ.
It's already done and tested and working fine. Regards, ken -- "This world ain't big enough for the both of us," said the big noema to the little noema. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org