Re: Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

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Timothy Murphy wrote:

But what has that got to do with desktops or laptops?
I think he meant to contrast desktops to servers.

OK, thanks.
I often seem to mis-interpret the word "desktop",
as eg in "desktop environment" or "desktop manager".
It seems to be a word with several different meanings.

Yes, it could be used to indicate a program set (GUI, office productivity programs), or a single user machine that can be powered down at any time, or several other concepts that aren't always true. With Linux, any machine might be multi-user and/or running network services for others, and none of the programs necessarily run on the physical device that displays them (think ssh, remote X, or freenx/NX).

On desktops some people might prefer to configure their MUA(s) to speak
SMTP directly with an ISP or 3rd party relay, but the preference is more
likely due to the nicer fill-in-the-form configuration interface instead
of the overall functionality.

I must admit I'm rather ignorant in this area.
Are you just saying you could use another program in place of sendmail?

You could (postfix is functionally equivalent), but what I meant was that sendmail could have a GUI config tool that took the same information as you provide a GUI MUA. It doesn't, and since it has so many options and a cryptic text config file, many users may not bother making it work in their situations.

I understand that; but it is easy enough to turn off the sendmail service
and start some other service, if that is what you want.

You can bypass it completely if you configure your MUA to use some other server and don't use any traditional unix style mail.

Perhaps if you gave an explicit example of "speaking SMTP directly"
I would understand better.

Modern MUA's have network POP/IMAP reception and STMP sending protocols built in. You can configure those to work directly with any network target(s) you want. In an office, that might be your company's mail server - at home it might be your ISP or 3rd party services like gmail. Whenever you send or receive mail, the MUA will connect over the network to the configured server(s) without needing any local sendmail support. However, in the traditional unix mail scheme, senders like cron, logwatch, and an assortment of other tools don't have individual configuration for mail delivery. The old philosophy was 'one tool does one job well' and 'unix processes are cheap, start another one if you need it', so they just run sendmail and pipe the message to it for delivery. Sendmail can be configured to do just about anything - the traditional unix scheme was to deliver to local mailbox files per user but it can just as easily forward everything to a server elsewhere. The advantage of setting this up is that it is a system-wide service so besides working with unix tools, you can also let your MUA(s) use local sendmail as the transport so you only have to configure it once even if you use multiple MUA's or have multiple users or both. When you use sendmail for delivery it will accept a message and queue it for delivery with automatic retries if it can't reach the relay immediately. This may or may not be better than seeing it in your MUA's outbox until it is delivered at least to a reliable forwarding relay.

--
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx



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