[plug] Smallest MTA (Sendmail/SMTP) for Ubuntu

[Daniel Pittman]

William Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au> writes:

> On Sun, 2009-05-03 at 01:06 +0800, Tim wrote:
>> So all I want basically is cron jobs, and database backups sent to my
>> email. But, I don't want to setup a full MTA (SMTP server) and I don't
>> want to relay through another SMTP server as I have no idea where my
>> clients machines are going to be.
>> So... What's the smallest MTA/SMTP server people know for Ubuntu, and
>> easiest to configure for just basic sending only?

I use Postfix; you can make one debconf decision at install time and you
have a "no local delivery" MTA.

> *  mail-mta/ssmtp
>       Latest version available: 2.62-r4
>       Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
>       Size of downloaded files: 55 kB
>       Homepage:    ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/ssmtp/
>       Description: Extremely simple MTA to get mail off the system to a
> Mailhub
>       License:     GPL-2
>
> This is about as basic as it gets.  Its what comes with gentoo's basic
> install.

It also fails miserably if your SMTP server is not accessible, because
it doesn't queue.  That means lost backups and cron error messages if
your network is down; that may be acceptable, but probably isn't.

(Oh, and it doesn't meet the "don't want to relay through" part of the
 original posters request ;)

nullmailer is not LSB compliant, is small, and is send-only, but I can't
see why you would bother when a satellite Postfix installation uses
about the same resources and delivers a lot more functionality.


Exim and sendmail are also fine choices for the role, and are about as
difficult to configure; I don't use them myself, but there is no reason
they wouldn't serve.

Regards,
        Daniel