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Home > Archive > Debian Developers > August 2004 > initial mail setup proposal was: Re: Please participate in popularity-contest
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initial mail setup proposal was: Re: Please participate in popularity-contest
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| Malte Cornils 2004-08-10, 7:56 am |
| Hello,
On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 11:37:04AM +0200, Tore Anderson wrote:
> Besides, base even includes an MUA. I certainly expect an MUA to be
> able to send to remote destinations
> [...]
> Then there's popularity-contest [...] I think reportbug also deserves mention here [...]
> endeavour to have working with an absolute minimum of user configuration
> required.
>
> * Andreas Metzler
In my experience installing Debian for quite a varied number of people,
most need something similar to the mail account setup in most graphical
MUAs - most common setups here in Germany would use a SMTP submission
service with SMTP-after-POP or SMTP-auth via TLS. Unfortunately, this
would "bloat" the d-i setup with questions for account, password and the
same for POP3. Best for those users would probably be configuring fetchmail
in conjunction with exim.
This group is closely followed by those which use pure webmail (those
would probably be best served by local delivery only). Since they are
mostly inexperienced users, making it easy for them should be the
default.
Users which use DNS/SMTP are almost always able and knowledgable enough
to do a eximconfig to configure everything to their liking post-install
(or even manually).
[vbcol=seagreen]
> Again, I'm aware that it is possible to override the default values
> and thus enable all of Exim's functionality. What I'm arguing is that
> «internet site» should be the default preselected choice, just like it is
> in the Exim 3 package. That way remote email will work in most cases
> without demanding that the user must configure the MTA differently than
> the default.
I'd argue that most users expect mail regarding their new Debian system
to land in their main inbox. They do not even know that their new
desktop system has its own mail system. And at least for students, most
live behind a NAT router, so port 25 is not reachable from the outside
anyway.
Proposal:
1. We're now going to setup your email system.
( ) Local mail system (if you have no Internet connection or pure Webmail)
( ) Send and fetch mail via SMTP/POP3/IMAP
( ) Advanced configuration (also for modem/ISDN users directly
connection to the Internet)
If you're unsure, choose the first.
(Advanced configuration would lead to the well-known exim4 question set,
local mail system would just enable local delivery. If not
2. fetching mail
( ) fetch mail from POP3 mail server
( ) fetch mail from IMAP mail server
[ ] secure connection (encrypted SSL/TLS)
[ ] keep mail on server
(then, asks for server name/username/password. If the last option is
checked, the various tricks to detect new mail in the POP3 case should
be employed)
3. sending mail
[ ] secure connection (encrypted SSL/TLS)
[ ] needs authentication (username and password)
[ ] need to fetch mails before being able to send (POP-before-SMTP)
(asks for server name, ask for username/password if checked)
I am not sure whether this is easy enough though and I hope I'm not
missing something obvious :-( This is obviously sarge+1 stuff.
-Malte
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| Justin Pryzby 2004-08-10, 5:57 pm |
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| Justin Pryzby 2004-08-10, 8:51 pm |
| `dnsdomainname` is an interesting default; of course its not guaranteed
to work (for me its just my local host name). Probably you already have
something on your system saying "use this to send mail" (a "smarthost").
Otherwise, none of these would have worked.
Another option would be to do a dnslookup on 'smtp-server', which seems
to get used sometimes.
Justin
On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 01:48:37PM +0200, Tore Anderson wrote:
> Anyway, to see if you or I am the odd man out here :-) , I tested the
> packages that are providing mail-transport-agent to see if they worked
> with only their default configuration. My Debconf priority is set
> to "high" - and the packages was installed by just hitting enter whenever
> I was asked something, and finally send an email to a remote address
> and see if it arrived.
>
> Results:
>
> postfix, courier-mta: Worked without requiring any interaction.
>
> exim (v3): Worked fine, but insisted on me entering the account
> rootmail should be forwarded to.
>
> sendmail: Worked fine, but I had explicitly say that I wanted to
> configure it.
>
> smail: Insisted on me specifying smarthost (I entered "none") and
> an alias for rootmail just like exim. After that, it sent mail
> just fine.
>
> xmail: Didn't provide /usr/lib/sendmail (policy violation?), but
> mail sent via 'nc localhost smtp' arrived to the remote
> destination as expected.
>
> emtp-run: Did not work, probably due to its nature - it requires
> a mail relay to function as far as I understand.
>
> nullmailer, ssmtp: Worked, though that was probably just luck -
> they seem to require an smtp relay just like esmtp-run, but
> guessed mail.`dnsdomainname` in the default configuration which
> happens to work here.
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| Andreas Metzler 2004-08-10, 8:51 pm |
| On 2004-08-10 Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> pop-con and reportbug can always do:
> escape($DATA);
> mail `host -tmx $DEST |perl` <<-EOF
> helo `hostname`
> mail from: <nobody@`hostname -f`>
> rcpt to: $TO
> data
> $DATA
> .
> EOF
> Maybe we should provide this for those packages, for uniformity?
[...]
reportbug includes code for direct smtp-delivery without MTA iirc even
in woody.
cu andreas
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| Andrew Pollock 2004-08-12, 2:49 am |
| On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 11:43:44AM -0400, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> `dnsdomainname` is an interesting default; of course its not guaranteed
> to work (for me its just my local host name). Probably you already have
> something on your system saying "use this to send mail" (a "smarthost").
> Otherwise, none of these would have worked.
>
> Another option would be to do a dnslookup on 'smtp-server', which seems
> to get used sometimes.
If you're going to rely on non-standard naming conventions like that, you're
gonna have a bad time...
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