Sad Clouds <cryintotheblue...@gmail.com> writes: > I'm questioning if having Postfix in the base system is that useful > and how many people actually use it. I'm trying to understand how people > use subsystems like Postfix when they have no requirement to run email > servers. It seems the main reason for having it is to use it as a basic > MTA and email daily/weekly reports to sysadmins. Essentially it is used > as a monitoring tool, that can take the output from other tools like > netstat, vmstat, etc and email it to someone. There doesn't seem to be > any other use case for having it. Or maybe I'm missing something here.
I have a number of machines, and almost all of them send either daily mail or messages on boot, typically to me someplace else. This basically requires an MTA > It seems quite often Postfix is pointless on a desktop system. Most > users tend to use some GUI MUA that has built-in MTA + POP3 + IMAP > capabilities and doesn't even talk to a local Postfix subsystem. For the user aspect, perhaps, but how are the people that are managing these systems getting information? > If you run a network appliance, you can setup Postfix to email daily > reports to some remote email server. However you now have to setup and > administer this email server, and maybe POP3 or IMAP server. You also > need an email client. You could also use other peoples' email > infrastructure (Gmail) but then they could potentially monitor all your > activity. This seems like a lot of faff just for the sake of some basic > email alerts and reports. I find your assumptions strange. I simply send all reports to myself, at an address that has to work regardless, and then filter them into a particular IMAP folder. So the "work" amounts to pointing root to my own address.
