Author: dman Date: To: exim-users Subject: Re: [Exim] Exim on a single-user system
On Mon, Dec 31, 2001 at 05:50:22PM -0500, Derek Broughton wrote: | dman wrote: | | > Here's the problem. A MUA should not be dealing with SMTP -- an MTA
| > should. mutt (and, AFAIK, elm and pine) do not do SMTP at all.
| > Instead they pipe the message to the system's MTA and let it take
| > responsibility for delivering it. | | That hair needs an electron microscope to split. :-)
:-).
| I can't imagine any good reason why an MUA shouldn't deal with SMTP.
Do you consider exim to be a trivial program? Proper mail delivery is
not simple on the internet because it is such a large network. It
also adds complexity to the MUA, reimplementing the same thing the MTA
already implements.
| In fact, as configured, SMTP on localhost is usually your MTA. It makes
| much more sense for every MUA to assume it has access to an SMTP port on
| _some_ host than to assume that it will have access to an MTA program.
Well, instead of thinking of the MTA as a separate program, think of
it more like a dynamically loaded library. That's the sort of
functionality that pipes provide.
| I don't think I want just anybody able to execute sendmail or exim.
Why not? They have to get on to your machine in the first place (so
either they are legit or they are a cracker and you have bigger
problems). For incoming SMTP connections, exim must verify the
legitimacy of the message however from a pipe, the message is
obviously legit since it originates from a user on the system.
I think mutt has good modularity and division of responsibility in its
design. If your system lacks a complete MTA (eg cygwin) there is
an incomplete MTA called 'ssmtp' that works well. I've seen (or heard
of) many MUAs that try to implement everything for themself (POP,
IMAP, SMTP, etc) and are often buggy.
