[Popcon-developers] Bug#741104: popularity-contest: Silently fails to send anything if no MTA configured

[Bill Allombert]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 06:20:07PM +0100, Mark Carroll wrote:
> It would be great if that MAILTO= trick could be more obviously exposed
> in the configuration dialog, as I generally avoided allowing
> popularity-contest to remain installed on systems because I was under
> the impression I couldn't stop it trying to send e-mail and I didn't
> want the failed e-mails to accumulate in the spool of the many machines
> for which I don't actually configure outgoing SMTP.

Hello Mark,

The trick is listed in the FAQ:

  Q) How can I prevent popularity-contest from sending reports via email?
  
  A) This is not recommended. Reports are sent by email only when the HTTP
  submission fails, which is generally caused by a temporary lack of internet
  connectivity. By contrast, reports sent by email are stored in the mail server
  queue until the internet connectivity is back.
  
  Nevertheless, you can prevent popularity-contest from sending reports via email
  by adding
  MAILTO= 
  to /etc/popularity-contest.conf

I would like to the warning above that sometimes HTTP submissions on servers
using NTP because too many systems try to report at the same tie, which
overload the popcon server. We are working on a fix.

Thanks for using popularity-contest!
-- 
Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.