On Thursday 11 December 2008 17:22:35 Jorey Bump wrote: > 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.
Examples of which would be nbsmtp, sSMTP, nullmailer etc.? Yeah, I noticed those. Hm.. It seems I could configure ssmtp to use authentication like I would need to to send, and I am online most of the time, so it would probably work ok. It only violates any and all sense of elegance ;-/ > 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. Just went through a non-trivial case of that, yes, so that is not an issue, except perhaps the potential to screw it up by trying to be to be too clever :) > 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. Hm.. yes, it all gets swapped out when not actually in use and so on. If there is general agreement on that I guess all I am left with is my sense of technical overkill and ugliness :( > 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. On the other hand one might presume that all the daemons that send the mail I'm interested in are rather well used and polished as well, and that perhaps I'm spending a lot of time researching something I could hack up in a few hours in python. The sendmail commandline is not rocket science after all. I guess I will have to see if my sense of in-elegance and overkill is sufficiently strong to overcome the challenge :) Thanks for the input. Gaute
