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

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sat, 06 Jun 2020 19:37:39 -0400
Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:

> I have a number of machines, and almost all of them send either daily
> mail or messages on boot, typically to me someplace else.  This
> basically requires an MTA

I'm curious, what sort of essential information do these emails
provide on a daily basis? Is it simply that some cron job completed
successfully?

Personally, I would like to see graphs and charts of
cpu/memory/disk/network usage. I would like to archive various security
and cron logs in a different location, so that hackers cannot easily
delete them. If I'm running email/web/database services, I would like
to archive all logs, statistics and performance metrics, on a frequent
(maybe hourly?) basis. If the database has performance issues at
specific times, I would like to be able to go back in history and
analyse all logs and metrics. Some of those metrics could be stored in
binary files and may need specific tools to extract visual graphs, etc.

I don't think sending all that data to my email account is going to be
very practical. So at least for how I would like to configure my
systems, Postfix does not seem very useful. Yes I can disable it from
rc.conf so not a big issue. I'm not asking people to remove Postfix,
just trying to understand how useful it is and how many people actually
use it.