[vox-tech] MTA

[Brian Lavender]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 02:18:24PM -0700, Nick Schmalenberger wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 08:43:28AM -0500, Chanoch (Ken) Bloom wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> Yes, exactly. I really like ssmtp for this, and its also
> available in debian with Provides: mail-transport-agent so it
> fills the requirement of other packages that need to send mail.
> Nick Schmalenberger

While configuring exim is not a trivial task, the debian configuration
scripts work well, and automate much of the process (all of it for basic
many configurations). Run the following as root.

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

brian
-- 
Brian E. Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"All too often, developers spend a majority of their time integrating
disparate technologies, manually tracking state, struggling to understand
JSF, wrestling with Hibernate exceptions, and constantly redeploying
applications, rather than on the logic pertaining to the business at hand."
- Seam Overview