Simple no-daemon mail transport agent

[okram]

Here's what I want to do: I've got a system that's permanently connected to the internet by ADSL. Iptables is set up not to allow any incoming connections. I'm not running any servers that listen on the pppoe interface, and only ssh and cups on the LAN.

All email is sent via my ISP's smtp server. Now, when I run the "at" command to run a commands at a certain time, the output is supposed to be emailed to the user running "at". I like that and would like it to work. There are various ways in which it can work:

1) No-nonsense local delivery: user@local.machine runs at; mail is put into /home/user/.maildir (or whatever mail spool is set up); end of story

2) Local delivery with aliasing: user@local.machine runs at; mta checks for alias or ~/.forward and forwards mail to, e.g., nickname@yahoo.com

Neither of these two ways is difficult to achieve (sendmail, postfix, qmail all do it, I suppose) but I don't want to have a mail daemon running in the background just for those not so frequent occasions when "at" or some other program wants to send a user some mail.

Which MTAs can do this (1 or 2 above) without running as a daemon?

I've looked at the documentation of postfix, qmail, sendmail and ssmtp and am a little uncertain now.

It seems that:-

- ssmtp does not run as a daemon but can only do straighforward relaying to a mail host without the aliasing part of the job;
- sendmail can do everything but is an insecure and tricky to configure monster;
- postfix only works as a daemon;
- and so does qmail.

Have I got this right?
What system would you recommend? Or is there maybe an advantage to having a mail daemon running in the background?
Looking forward to your suggestions.

[ballardb]

I was wondering the very same thing. I would like the results of any cron jobs to be delivered to the user locally on the machine. I dont want it to send straight to my account via my ISP.

There seem to be lots of posts of "oh, and just configure your ssmtp" and " oh you need an MTA", but all I want is the quick straight redirection of mail to the mailbox of the account on the Gentoo box. No ISP, no Demon running all the time... Can it be done?

Any ideas people?? If so How can I configure sssmtp to do it?
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[caffiend]

You will have to have an MTA installed, the mailer daemon does not need to be running all the time, but it will need to be there for the system to call.

SSMTP just forwards to an actual MTA, so it won't help you there.

Exim works just fine for me in this manner.