[vox-tech] MTA

[Chanoch (Ken) Bloom]

On Thu, 2010-04-29 at 01:04 -0700, Richard Harke wrote:
> Not the MTA Charlie got stuck on. I'm running Debian and every recent
> (and maybe not so recent) install has installed exim4 as a Mail Transfer
> Agent. But is not clear that this is doing anything for me. I normally do email
> through my ISP or in some cases through gmail. When I take my laptop
> out for coffee, it takes a really long time to decide to skip the MTA startup
> because it doesn't have internet access. Is there any reason I can't or shouldn't
> disable it?

AFAICT, nothing important *depends* on an MTA, but several potentially
important pieces of software recommend it, including at and cron which
use it to notify of the output of their jobs.

The best thing to do is probably to install a lightweight non-daemon
mailer like esmtp-run so that programs that need it can still have
access to a sendmail command.