This is more on the "what the heck" but not anything really wrong. Hoping to find out how to correctly respond to a customer questions. Hundreds of emails found on his server.
I wrote a reply that said if you don't use email on your server then don't enable an email program, SendMail or anything else. Then I asked him where he found these emails. I was thinking in what directory in what folder but he meant the GUI. Webmin, Servers, Postfix Mail
I checked that location on one of our own server and there are many emails. Mostly just connections dropped but there was an attempt to send an email. The question is why are they there if the service is not even running? If you can give an intelligent answer to a stupid question I would then give him an intelligent answer. As if perhaps I actually knew the intelligent answer, which I don't.
I was about to tell him that PHP does not need a regular mail server and has the ability to send form outputs and such without them. Thinking I might be ignorant on this subject. Please help Mr. Wizard.
Comments
Submitted by andreychek on Wed, 08/21/2013 - 18:57 Comment #1
Howdy -- well, that's one of those areas where we might need some additional information to be able to really give a good answer.
My first thought is that, while perhaps not intentionally, there really may still be some sort of mail service installed that's capable of delivering email to remote systems. There are lighter weight systems than Postfix and Sendmail, for folks who don't need a full mail server -- it's possible one of those is on there.
If someone runs this command, that would show what, if anything, is listening on port 25:
netstat -anlp | grep :25You're right though -- you don't actually need a mail server to send an email. PHP (or any other application) could talk directly to a remote server, if the application were configured to do so.