None of the Above (was Re: Sendmail still default?)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 08:52:27AM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >I'm pretty solidly of the opinion that email is nowhere near being the 
> >most sensible way to get important information to a typical desktop 
> >user. If a failure is important then the user needs to know about it as 
> >soon as possible - mail provides no guarantees about timely delivery. We 
> >have plenty of desktop infrastructure to give important alerts to users, 
> >we're just failing to do so.
> 
> If local delivery of mail fails, there's no reason to think any other 
> notification method would have succeeded.  The important point is that 
> the user may not be present when the event occurs, and that desktop 
> infrastructure may not even be running - and even if it is, the 
> interested party may want the notification to be forwarded elsewhere.

Local delivery of mail is a poor solution, since it provides no 
indication of priority difference between "You've got spam" and "Your 
hard drive is failing". If there's nobody to present it to, it can be 
queued and presented at login - if the user is running on their system 
but doesn't have the desktop infrastructure running, then by definition 
they're already outside the standard desktop usecase.

I'm not arguing about the utility of an MTA for various situations. I'm 
arguing that for one specific and very common situation, using an MTA to 
deliver system alerts is a poor way of handling it. We should fix that. 
As a happy side effect, it removes the need for a default MTA in the 
desktop install. People who want an MTA then get to choose whichever MTA 
they want and net human happiness is increased.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org