Re: Postfix and local mail delivery - still relevant in 2020?

[Michael van Elst <mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost>]

On Sat, Jun 06, 2020 at 11:19:32PM +0100, Sad Clouds wrote:

> MTA and email daily/weekly reports to sysadmins. Essentially it is used
> as a monitoring tool, that can take the output from other tools like
> netstat, vmstat, etc and email it to someone. There doesn't seem to be
> any other use case for having it. Or maybe I'm missing something here.

Mail delivery is used by other things, in particular cronjobs daily
mails are just using that generic mechanism.

And yes, that is only part of the postfix functionality. But postfix
isn't large and the functionality isn't enabled. It just needs a few
disk blocks.


> It seems quite often Postfix is pointless on a desktop system. Most
> users tend to use some GUI MUA that has built-in MTA + POP3 + IMAP
> capabilities and doesn't even talk to a local Postfix subsystem.

If mail == "use a service you bought from a provider", then yes. But
mail is a more generic mechanism.

In many cases, like an enterprise environment, it wouldn't be allowed
to connect to a mail server of your choice, and nobody would expect
you to configure your MUA for that.


> activity. This seems like a lot of faff just for the sake of some basic
> email alerts and reports.

By default you run the mail command to see messages sent to you. The
shell can even notify you about new mail.

N.B. if you want central delivery of messages, then you need to set up
a central server receiving the messages. Whether that's email or syslog
is a small detail.


Greetings,
-- 
                                Michael van Elst
Internet: mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost
                                "A potential Snark may lurk in every tree."