On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 04:27:03PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> Smail, Exim, and Sendmail should all be able to do local delivery unless
> something else is critically wrong in which case they each should still
> accept a message on stdin from the command-line and store it in the
> queue and hopefully write error messages to logs that the admin will
> hopefully eventually see.
> 
> Postfix is a little more complex because IIRC it has to be running in
> order to complete any local deliveries.

I see three options (in not particular order):

1) Make Postfix the default. Run it by default, but with a master.conf
which only includes the required components for local delivery (i.e. no
smtpd listening on port 25...). Provide an easy way to switch to a
'normal' full Postfix configuration, for those who choose to.

2) Make sendmail work for local delivery. Either by checking the config
(perhaps at the start of /etc/daily, confirm that local mail will work,
otherwise write warnings to syslog and the console, and/or deliver
output into /var/mail/root directly (ignoring any aliases).

3) Find/write a BSD licensed minimal LDA, and use it in place of 'mail'
in the crons and rc scripts that have this issue.

							David