Reasons behind defaulting atd and sendmail

Chris Tyler chris at tylers.info
Fri Sep 5 16:33:52 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 09:23 -0500, Mike Cronenworth wrote:
> 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.

Ok, but here are two examples where outbound e-mail works out of the box
on a desktop:

(1) I have an "ISP With A Clue" providing a static IP on the public side
of the NAT router at my home, so Fedora boxes on my LAN can send mail
without any additional mail configuration. (This works for all
non-desktop sends. For sending from, say, Evolution, the only config
necessary is to select "sendmail" for outgoing mail -- dirt simple).

(2) At work, we have static, public IP addresses -- common in colleges,
universities, and some companies. Again, my desktop can send mail
without any additional configuration.

(And I'm still not convinced that "default install"=="desktop install").


> 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.

"You cannot send mail to the LAN" is patently untrue. A default Fedora
install will be able to *send* mail to the LAN in the vast majority of
cases. This means that redirecting all those pesky logwatch reports you
mentioned is as simple as adding an alias for root to /etc/aliases.

Receiving mail on the lan is a different issue altogether -- but then
the number of machines receiving mail via SMTP is usually far less than
the number of machines sending it.

-Chris





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