postfix

I don't know why but this is one of those things that I find extremely annoying to set up. Mainly because it often requires installing a full-blown MTA to do a much simpler job than it was designed to do. Unfortunately, ssmtp and exim, the only simpler ones often suck (ssmtp especially which even the maintainer gave up on). What follows is how I got postfix working on my Feisty machine:

sudo apt-get install postfix
sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix

Here are the options to answer in order:

Why ssmtp should be removed from gentoo:

• ssmtp is no longer maintained upstream
• Even its successor, bssmtp has been abandoned. The writer of bssmtp and maintainer of ssmtp said himself "I have now switched back to using Postfix on my laptop."

According to this page by the maintainer, the two advantages of ssmtp are:

• it is light (doesn't matter if it's crap)
• it is easy to configure (it appears that way at first, but it isn't necessarily so, if you check out the gentoo forums)