Finally did an dist-upgrade from Sarge/Testing to Etch/Testing and courier-mta is a dep of webmin-core and at?

I dont want or need courier-mta on my desktop, dont really need webmin-core either mind you, however, did I miss this is the original install or is this a new dependency?

Is there a way to install at and webmin-core without courier-mta etc?
I've tried echo <package name> hold | dpkg --set-selections but when I try apt-get install at for example it still tries to install courier-mta, -authdaemon, -base etc.

courier-mta is not in any means a dependency of webmin-core.

Look: Debian -- webmin-core

That's what I thought, however when I go apt-get install webmin-core I get the following:
Pebcak:/home/jason# apt-get install webmin-core
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
at courier-authdaemon courier-base courier-mta
Suggested packages:
courier-doc courier-filter-perl webmin-lvm mdctl mdadm
The following NEW packages will be installed:
at courier-authdaemon courier-base courier-mta webmin-core
The following held packages will be changed:
courier-authdaemon courier-base
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 3572kB of archives.
After unpacking 17.2MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

So it may be at that is the problem. But once again as little as I use webmin it's "interesting" to see that to get that I have to apparently install a MTA on a desktop.

That could be because before this, you've tried installing courier and canceled mid-way. This way apt-get would know that you've wanted to install it, and will install it everytime you run apt-get.

Before installing webmin, do:and then try to install webmin.

Darn it, same problem. It wants to install those silly courier packages.

at depends on a MTA, webmin-core depends on at. You need an MTA to get those installed. You can install something else like Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, etc if you don't like Courier.

Why install an MTA on a desktop machine is the problem I have Noth, theres no need. One can get email quite nicely both from an ISP or in my case my mail server without it.

I can live without webmin-core quite nicely, especially on the desktop, at this point its more me being puzzled at having to install a MTA more then anything else.

Because traditionally every unix machine has had sendmail installed on it, things like cron, at, etc were built with the assumption that they would be able to send mail locally and have the local MTA decide what to do with it.