On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, Aaron J. Grier wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 26, 2000 at 10:05:33AM -0700, Pete Naylor wrote:
> 
> > Including both sendmail and postfix is just plain silly, IMHO.
> 
> I've wondered about this too...  why does NetBSD include a networkable
> MTA in the first place?  seems like the minimal solution would be to
> include mail.local and nothing else, and modifying any scripts to call
> mail.local aliased as "mail" instead of sendmail.  (or maybe use the
> mailwrapper to fake sendmail with mail.local.)

I was thinking at first that just having a simple mailer that can send out
via the network but doesn't run as a daemon and can not accept network
connections would be a good idea.

(For example, Debian has a package called ssmtp, that simply sends a
message to a mailhub; it doesn't handle aliases or manage a queue. But I
have never used it and so I don't know how it does local deliveries and
what happens -- since it doesn't queue -- when you need to mail to the
mailhub but your mail connection is down. Probably not a good choice.)

Does anyone know of a very simple mailer that expands aliases, manages a
queue and can deliver via a network or locally, but doesn't (can't) run as
a daemon?

Having a networkable SMTP is needed by default in my opinion (and maybe a
mail daemon is a good idea -- just like a ftp daemon is available). I
don't agree with having two installed.

(On a side note: I'd prefer sendmail or exim as the default. Because on a
low-mail system I would rather just have one command that does all the
work. I have used Postfix on a few machines for the past nine months and I
am still learning, but it seems like I must have several of the postfix
utilities (master, pickup, qmgr) always running to do their jobs.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/