Re: [gentoo-user] minimal / stand-alone mail daemon?

[Alarig Le Lay]

On Mon Jan 16 16:51:16 2017, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> Hello again,
>
> it's no secret that I'm partial to the Exim MTA and I love to teach it
> new tricks.  However running Exim on a workstation (mobile or not) is
> serious overkill.  Exim compares to sendmail in power but also in the
> complexity of its configuration.  Most of this power is wasted when all
> it's doing is delivering output from cron and at.  Perhaps more
> importantly, though, it tends to assume its host is always online and
> DNS is available to resolve arbitrary domain names; this can cause
> misbehavior when the assumption fails.  I just made a change in the
> configuration and suddenly my desktop started stalling for 20 seconds on
> boot; my investigation, which was longer than I'd have liked, showed
> that it was due to dnsmasq trying to answer a query from Exim - and
> failing because the network interface was not fully up when the query
> was made.
>
> I know that there's a number of "minimal" MTAs which are supposedly
> suitable for the workstation role - such as nullmailer or ssmtp.  But,
> they all seem to want to completely avoid dealing with local mailboxes
> and deliver everything to a hub server.  What I need is just the
> opposite - a mailer that is completely ignorant of networking but
> understands mail store formats and local aliases so it can deliver
> output from daemons, even if no network is available.  Is there any such
> thing?  Of course a gentoo package would be great but I can
> self-maintain too if necessary.
>
> And if you don't know of one, I'd like to hear how you deal with this.

Hi,

As a tiny mailserver, you can use mail-mta/opensmtpd, with a
configuration like this:

listen on localhost
table aliases file:/etc/mail/aliases
accept for local alias <aliases> deliver to mbox

-- 
alarig