On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 16:57:11 -0000 (UTC)
mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost (Michael van Elst) wrote:
> cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost (Sad Clouds) writes:
>
> >I've been wondering - why have Postfix in the base system and why
> >have it enabled by default?
>
> Simple answer, mail is used by automated tasks to deliver results
> to users.
>
OK, but does this really require the entire Postfix infrastructure?
A small mail delivery tool would be sufficient, e.g somebody mentioned
Dragonfly mail agent.
I kind of understand that it is traditional in Unix to email daily
reports to a sysadmin. This may have been reasonable decades ago, but
in 2020 it seems a bit primitive and not very useful for even a medium
number of networked systems.
There is a lot of information that can be collected on a daily basis,
for example - cpu/memory/disk/network metrics, thermal metrics, firewall
logs and alerts, mail/web/database/backup logs/alerts, etc. Sifting
through all of that in emails does not seem very productive.
I'm thinking that Postfix and similar, are good for running mail
servers, but for system monitoring and alerting, there may be better
tools out there. If you want to keep it really simple, why bother with
SMTP and mail clients at all? Just sftp all the results to a central
location and ssh there when you want to view them.