Re: e-mail applications

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Jim Jackson wrote:

> > A single-user machine doesn't really need to have sendmail.
> Oh yes it does (or some substitute) so that local mail can be delivered.

This is correct. In fact, I would argue any unix machine should have both
sendmail and fetchmail configured correctly. For example, YaST needs to
have sendmail running to send people messages about server
reconfigurations, problems, etc. Besides, any email program (and most do)
should be using sendmail and fetchmail, because there's no reason to
reinvent the wheel. They're not exactly hard to use:
cat email_message | sendmail

> You should NEVER be using linux as a genuine single user machine - this
> implies everything is done as root. You should have at least two accounts
> - root and a user one. You should preferably have several accounts for
> doing different things - it called good house keeping.

root is going to be less and less important when these planned permissions
changes come in. It might stop the odd sudo rm -rf /, you never know ;)

Cheers,

Alex

Start your own FREE mailing list at

© 2000 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved