I understand your point completely. Five years ago I would agree, but these days, things aren't necessarily the same.
If you have a Web cluster with fifteen plus machines, are you really going to run an MTA on each one? It would likely be a lot easier to use the designated MTA and go from there. Should each user in a company have an MTA on their local workstation just because?
Yes, networks can be unreliable, but then, if they're down, who's using your application anyway? Secondly, if your MTA is down, don't you think that's going to get fixed right away? These things are usually important. And yes, services can be overloaded, but what does this mean?
I'd rather not have to rewrite my application just because I kill off the local MTA, or change it to something more secure than sendmail.
I don't mean to badger. We all have our preferences. Given that, I reiterate: Since you can use Mail::Mailer in either SMTP or 'mailx'-type mode, it's probably better to use that than to just assume 'mailx' is going to work. You can, after all, use Mail::Mailer in a variety of ways, but 'mailx' only works in one, possibly broken, way.
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If you have a Web cluster with fifteen plus machines, are you really
going to run an MTA on each one?
If I have a web cluster with fifteen machines, running 15,000 programs,
I rather have to deal with 15 MTAs than 15,000 - because every program
that delivers mail is an MTA.
Should each user in a company have an MTA on their local workstation just
because.
Yes, but that's irrelevant.
Yes, networks can be unreliable, but then, if they're down, who's using
your application anyway?
Just because you can't reach your mail server because of network problems
doesn't mean you are unreachable by someone else.
Secondly, if your MTA is down, don't you think that's going to get
fixed right away?
Sure. But what if that's going to take a few hours? Even in a company
where there's 7x24x365 support, it might take a while before the problem
gets fixed.
And yes, services can be overloaded, but what does this mean?
It could mean the remote service is not accepting connections. What
should your program do, drop the mail in the bitbucket? I rather have
it queued and retried, it could be important.
I'd rather not have my application lose it's mind just because I kill
off the local MTA, or change it to something more secure than sendmail.
As long as the replacement comes with a drop-in replacement for sendmail,
there isn't a problem. I know qmail does.
Abigail
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