Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

[Mike Cronenworth]

-------- Original Message  --------
Subject: Re: Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail
From: Chris Tyler <chris at tylers.info>
To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora. 
<fedora-list at redhat.com>
Date: 09/05/2008 09:13 AM

> (a) With sendmail there, you have a chance of being able to send
> outbound e-mail. You may need to adjust the configuration depending on
> the network.
> 
> (b) Without sendmail or another MTA there, there is zero chance of being
> able to send outbound e-mail without doing configuration.

I believe Evolution is installed by default, is it not? *Desktop* Fedora 
users are guaranteed outbound e-mail with or without sendmail.

If a desktop application needs to send an e-mail to the Internet it will 
need to let the end-user take care of it due to my points about spam 
filtering.

> 
> So I suppose the question is "what percentage of systems in (a) can send
> outbound e-mail without further MTA configuration?" -- if this
> approaches 0, then a==b, and sendmail should be disabled by default. I
> don't think that's the case; sendmail can definitely send mail to the
> LAN, and there are a fair number of cases where sending beyond the LAN
> will work too (those with static IPs, those on a corporate or university
> network, ...)
> 

You cannot send mail to the LAN. By default sendmail is only able to 
accept email from 127.0.0.1. Plus, Fedora's default iptables rules do 
not include port 25. You would have to do quite a bit of extra 
configuration work to send messages between Fedora boxes on a LAN. The 
point is moot.

Mike