I am using LMDE fully updated. I am new to Mint and Debian. I believe this thread is more of a Debian question than Mint.

What is the traditional Debian (LMDE) way to configure the primary user to receive system mails, such as smartd messages? Is exim4 normally used for simple local system mails?

What is the Debian preferred way to forward root mails to the primary account? ~/.forward? /etc/aliases?

What is the preferred way to forward system mails to a webmail account when a user does not use a local mail client?

We don't need a full fledged mail server as in the traditional sense. We only want to capture system mails. Just a basic local-only MTA.

Note: the target end-users are not computer savvy. The process must be transparent to the user. No command line solutions please.

Thanks.

If the users are not tech-savvy, then why send rootmail to them? Are they going to know what a smart error is? Will they overreact? Will they ignore it until it's too late?

Your best money is on configuring Sendmail or postfix to send email from their local system to an admin alias.

As for aliases, I'm not much with Debian, but in rh-variants it is postfix in conjunction with /etc/aliases. Very simple configuration.

ssmtp is probably a good tool for the job.

These are private users. There are no sys admins.

How they react is something I cannot predict. I presume they will call me because that is their nature. That does not make me "the" sys admin. I don't get paid to be bothered with system mails from lots of other people. I am configuring the mails only as a curtesy when I install Linux for them.

Nor do I want their systems "phoning home."

I configured my disk images with the Mail Notification applet installed along with exim as a local MTA. If they use web mail they will receive a notification popup and if they want to read the system mail Thunderbird will open. Those who already use Thunderbird will receive the mails as normal. We only support Thunderbird at the moment.

Yeah, they never received such mails or notifications in their entire Windows life. Something new for them to get excited about.

Debian will typically set this up at install time, and can be changed by reconfiguring the package exim4-config:

You may have to change what level of questions you are asked by reconfiguring debconf, and selecting something like "low" for priority:

Oddly, LMDE does not, but that is more or less the steps I took to get everything working.

Originally I wanted to send emails to external email addresses as well as localhost addresses, which would be great for those who only use web mail, but then exim has to be configured differently and requires fully qualified domain names. As I guess the number of system mails to be about two per year, launching Thunderbird for those users is acceptable. The trick was finding a way to notify the users who don't use a mail client so they would open Thunderbird. The Mail Notification applet does well in that regard.