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Ubuntu (12.04 LTS) doesn't seem to install any sort of mailer by default.

Everybody seems to recommend installing Postfix. I am familiar with Postfix, which I use on several "real" servers.

But it feels wrong to install a heavy-duty fully featured mail server on a desktop, just so that (ana)cron emails have somewhere to go. There must be a more light-weight solution for such a trivial local-only task .

Which is the simplest mailer to install on my notebook, just so that system emails like cron errors are saved somewhere (just written to /var/mail/username would be sufficient).

mivk
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  • Give it a read to this http://askubuntu.com/q/2261/169736, in summary, there are several. – Braiam Apr 26 '14 at 12:47
  • Thanks. I had read that, but it recommends postfix. Or nullmailer which relays mail to another server, which I don't need. Local delivery into a Maildir or mbox file is sufficient. – mivk Apr 26 '14 at 13:10

1 Answers1

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The same question appeared on Unix.SE a while back:

MTAs such as Postfix and Exim have a much broader scope. Since I could not really find a single program specific for the purpose of "delivering" mail to a single directory, I ended up writing a new program, femtomail.

Have a look at the Unix.SE question for details or read the README in the femtomail repository.

Community
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Lekensteyn
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  • Thanks for femtomail! I have one bug report - it is necessary to manually create folder for mailing box, it is no done as part of the installation (I used default mailbox path and I installed femtomail on Ubuntu 14.04 as instructed by its readme). – reducing activity May 27 '15 at 14:56
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    @MateuszKonieczny Fixed in the README, thanks! – Lekensteyn May 27 '15 at 16:22