Gaute Amundsen wrote, at 12/11/2008 07:25 AM: > Slightly OT this, but I can't think on any other obvious place to ask, and an > hour of googling turned up little. > > The question: > What are my options if I don't want to run a full blown mail server, and > really only want all mail delivered to a single local mbox or maildir? > > There seems to be a number for minimal sendmal replacements that do smtp > only, > but none that delivers locally, and I don't think procmail or maildrop can > impersonate /usr/bin/sendmail directly.. > > Basically I run smartmontools and a number of cronjobs on my laptop and I > want > to get the reports and alerts, but I want to avoid the overhead of running > and > maintaining a full mailserver. > > I have a sneaky feeling that I am somehow not seeing the forest for all the > trees, or my assumptions are wrong, but I can't put my finger on it..
Minimal MTAs are usually developed for use with MUAs that don't include SMTP (such as Mutt) or to easily provide a way to use a relayhost on a per-user basis (so your outgoing messages don't get bounced). Therefore, they tend not to deal with local delivery. The good news is that the MTA provided with your distribution (either postfix or sendmail) is usually trivially easy to set up for local delivery, especially if the mail is locally generated. You might need to run the daemon, but the overhead is negligible, and modern distributions improve security by having it listen only on localhost by default. If you want to support a more complicated environment (such as running a local IMAP server), you may need additional tweaks, but if you simply want to read local system notifications, you usually need nothing more than the default MTA and an MUA (mail, nail, mutt, pine, kmail, etc.). The benefit you receive is that these widely used MTAs tend to handle mail more correctly, due to years of use and development.
