[Pan-devel] Re: Pan in Fedora Extras

[Duncan]

Greg Breland posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on
Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:46:58 -0600:

> As for SMTP auth, I'm surprised anyone has needed that since I bet 90%
> of users use their local MTA to handle mail.  Of course, I could be
> completely wrong but I've never used anything else.

I believe you underestimate the number of former Windows folks coming
over, who know nothing about setting up a local MTA or the like,
and have no immediate desire or need to learn.  Of course, that's not the
only source of folks unfamiliar with the traditional Unix method, but it's
probably the largest.

Here, I switched some years ago (lost track of how many, tho it'd be easy
to find out), when I realized eXPrivacy was setting a precedent I could
not follow.  Once the masses accepted phone-home authentication, before
being allowed to run stuff on their own computer, well... look at the
SonyBMG rootkit we have making headlines now...  I had been nudging toward
a switch for awhile, but I have MS to thank for that last push, causing me
to upgrade to Linux rather than eXPrivacy.

Anyway, I believe it's safe to say I pushed hard and learned far more than
most in the first few months, and even to this day -- I've certainly
integrated into the *ix and FLOSS culture better than most, but with all
that to learn, setting up a local MTA has somehow never been high enough
on my list to do it now, rather than something else.  (My most recent
project, FWIW, was learning and setting up a bootable Linux kernel based
multi-type RAID,  with LVM on part of it.  Before that it was finally
setting up SUDO, before that it was switching to Gentoo from Mandrake,
before that it was switching to AMD64 from x86, before that... All higher
priorities at the time than setting up an local MTA, when direct client
based access works just fine.)

I'd guess something closer to 20% of PAN users actually run a local MTA,
but of course that's just as much numbers pulled out of the air as your
own guess of 90% running their own.  I WOULD venture to say there's VERY
little chance it's /that/ high, tho I'll allow it may still be a majority,
perhaps as high as 60%.  90%?  /Extremely/ unlikely, in part because those
comfortable running an MTA have a higher than average chance of being
more comfortable with a text based news client than a GUI one such as PAN,
even if it's possible that 90% of the overall *ix user base (sans OSX)
still have a local MTA, itself rather low odds, IMO.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html