"$d_sysMaint""email programs/sSMTP notes.txt
www.BillHowell.ca  31Jan2020 initial


/home/bill/PROJECTS/System_maintenance/email programs/sSMTP notes.txt











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31Jan2020  Reject sendmail - use sSMTP? 
https://www.linux.com/news/ssmtp-simple-alternative-sendmail/



Caveats

Replacing Sendmail with sSMTP works well for desktop PCs that have only a single user configured. If you have multiple users, you may not want to use sSMTP, since by default all email sent via the mail command will look like it comes from a single user. An additional configuration file, revaliases, allows you to map a local user to a specific From: address on outbound mail and to route that mail through a specific mailhub. Still, there is no way to configure different logins on different mailhubs that use different different authentication credentials. With sSMTP, your outbound mail can only have one remote MTA to which it can connect.

Also, in order for any user on your system to use sSMTP, they will need to have read permissions on the ssmtp.conf file. Placing your ISP login information in a configuration file that is world-readable allows anyone who uses your system to see your email authentication information. This is another reason why use of sSMTP is appropriate only for home users who are the sole users of that system. You can fix this problem through normal user and group permissions and by running sSMTP as a setuid program, but not if you want to make things as simple as possible, as we set out to do.

While sSMTP is a replacement for Sendmail, it is not a complete replacement. One important distinction is that it is not intended to receive mail, as Sendmail does. You need to use a mail reader to retrieve and read email from your ISP.
>> Is fetchmail appropriate??

sSMTP also does not manage mail queues, so it sends outbound email immediately. Although the man page for sSMTP shows support for all the same command-line options that Sendmail supports, sSMTP ignores most of those options.

Finally, the sSMTP implementation enforces a limit on the size of outbound message headers. Try not to write long subject lines or include long lists of recipients. If you need to send something to a large list of recipients, set up an alias instead of manually listing all the recipients on the command line.
>> Ouch! this is a problem!!!!

sSMTP is exactly as advertised: simple. It requires only minimal effort to set up and little to no long-term maintenance. But it isn't appropriate for all users. Its greatest value is to the non-technical home user with only one user configured on a machine. To those users, sSMTP can be an easy way to improve messaging management.


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