I'm familiar with the fact that Linux, and many other *nix systems, seem to have a deely-entrenched mail delivery system. In over a year of using Linux, though, this facility hasn't really served much purpose for me beyond filling the queue of the little-used "mail" program with inane warnings from cron jobs.

What purpose does this facility serve on a modern system with only one local user?
What purpose might it otherwise serve?
How is it related to conventional Internet POP/IMAP mail, if at all?
Can I safely disable/remove it?

-Andrew

The mail system shouldn't be disabled even on a single-user system since it provides - as you noticed - an easily accessible warning system for applications to use when using the syslog is not desired.

Linux is traditionally a multiuser system (and it still is even if you're a single user on a system!), and as you might have noticed email is a very effective means of communicating with people. POP is a protocol to retrieve email from a server and isn't really considered a mail protocol like SMTP (the protocol that sends email to other servers) is. SMTP can be used locally, but usually a spool system is used instead. If your email system is configured correctly you should be able to send email from your box to anywhere, but it will most likely bounce or fail if your domain name isn't set up correctly. If an email addressed to you is sent to your system it should be processed and appear in your mail box just like the warnings you get from cron. The default level of functionality of email systems shipped by different distributions varies a lot so it might or might not work.


Håkan

Well, for one you can send mail to other users just like over the internet. Most sysadmins will setup other tasks instead of cron jobs to use mail, etc. There are a million reasons to use it really, but if your not going to yourself, you can safely turn it off, no harm done.

Regards.

How do I control what gets reported though mail? Is there a frontend besides the "mail" program?