Steve Langasek wrote: > "How do I deliver mail?" is a per-system setting, not a per-application > setting, and the move towards having MUAs talking SMTP directly to send > mail is a flawed model picked up on the Linux desktop from certain other > OSes.
No, "How do I deliver mail?" represents a per-user setting, and sometimes a per-user-email-address setting depending on the pickiness of mail servers about the addresses in "From:". I'll certainly agree that it might make sense to have a common SMTP configuration for sending email for a particular user (and possibly email address), so that MUAs can share it; the same thing goes for IMAP configuration, as well. However, neither of those should live in a system MTA, not least of which because if a system really did have multiple users, it wouldn't make sense to do all the work of figuring out which smarthost to use for which user rather than just letting each user's MUA handle mail for that user. > The right solution here is to fix the MTAs to be > configurable from the desktop, and fix the MUAs to use the MTA - *not* to > get rid of the MTA. MTAs would need to advance quite a bit to get anywhere near as usable as a MUA that speaks SMTP, not least of which in error reporting. (Most of the people I know who run local MTAs have had at least one "all my mail got stuck in a queue for one or more weeks" story.) More importantly, I don't advocate getting rid of any MTAs; I'm advocating that an MTA should not form part of standard, on the basis that most users don't want or need one. Anyone who needs an MTA can easily install one, while many people who *don't* need an MTA don't know that they can and should remove it. - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111015173945.GA23214@leaf
