Re: e-mail applications

[Martin P Holland <nospam [at] noether.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Wed, 09 Jun 1999, you wrote:
>sheflug - http://home.freeuk.net/shef.lug
>
>On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Martin P Holland wrote:
>
>> >
>> >SMTP POP3 are protocols, not software.
>>
>> I'm guessing but I expect that Richard wants his apps to work whether or not
>> people have sendmail set up properly on their system (or even installed at
all).
>>
>> 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.
>True you don't need it running as a daemon if it a stand-alone (not single
>user please) machine. I use email to self for leaving notes and info.
>When my machine boots as part of tidying up syslogs etc it emails root and
>my main account with what it has done etc etc
>
>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.
>
>But I think you meant stand alone.

Of course I don't disagree with any of this. I also strongly favour motherhood
and apple pie.

My real point was that
sendmail is fairly intimidating for a new user to linux and it's good to to
have email software (to mail to remote locations) that works out of the box
which is why it is good to have stuff that will directly use the smtp/pop
protocol and bypass sendmail. It's not realistic to assume that a new user will
have setup sendmail properly.

Actually I don't understand why the big distributions don't make more effort
to setup sendmail more automatically. Mind you I am still using RH5.1 so it
might be that the latest version of Linuxconf does this kind of thing. Anyone
using RH6.0 can tell us? Perhaps Caldera does?

atb
Martin
--
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~pm1mph

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