Re: need for open-minded help with popularity-contest with systemd timer

"Jonathan Dowland" <[email protected]> writes:
> On Sun Jul 26, 2026 at 4:56 PM BST, alimiracle wrote:

>> An explicit mail submission service with a well-defined API

> SMTP?

This is what I've personally done with systemd services that I've wanted
to harden by adding no-new-privileges, for example. I've switched them
over to submitting messages via SMTP to localhost, and that's been fine
for me. But it is worth noting that this loses information compared to
using the sendmail interface, specifically the user the process that sent
the email was running as.

It also requires running an SMTP listener on localhost, which people don't
always do on systems with stub SMTP clients. Of course for
popularity-contest it can submit directly to Debian in the most common
case, but a general solution to the problem would be useful.

Ideally there would be some protocol that could trace the submitted
message back to a user and possibly a process ID. I have wanted that
information for practical reasons before (trying to track down which
service was sending weird mail, for instance).