> Actually there are some packages that depend on a mail-transport-agent, > (such as lilo->logrotate->mailx), yet one may not want to have an MTA > running on certain systems. I suppose a dummy or minimal MTA may be
I think it's safe to assume that your system MUST have a working MTA of some sort (even if it's local-only, which is supported by eximconfig). Running a Unix system without an MTA *at*all* means that you won't get notified of failing cron jobs, etc. ... > used (and may exist, I'm not aware), but this certainly highlights the "apt-get install ssmtp". Note that this has terrible behaviour on even transient failure -- it just drops messages into dead-letter. Exim (don't run the daemon, just the cronjob that cleans the queue) works better for me. The OTHER daemons (certainly xdm) are optional. But I think it's probably safe to say that running Debian without an MTA is "unsupported". Will