Simplest MTA mail setup for a desktop to receive (ana)cron emails

Ubuntu (12.04 LTS) doesn't seem to install any sort of mailer by default.

Everybody seems to recommend installing Postfix. I am familiar with Postfix, which I use on several "real" servers.

But it feels wrong to install a heavy-duty fully featured mail server on a desktop, just so that (ana)cron emails have somewhere to go. There must be a more light-weight solution for such a trivial local-only task .

Which is the simplest mailer to install on my notebook, just so that system emails like cron errors are saved somewhere (just written to /var/mail/username would be sufficient).

Solution 1:

The same question appeared on Unix.SE a while back:

• Minimal MTA that delivers mail locally (for cron)?

MTAs such as Postfix and Exim have a much broader scope. Since I could not really find a single program specific for the purpose of "delivering" mail to a single directory, I ended up writing a new program, femtomail.

Have a look at the Unix.SE question for details or read the README in the femtomail repository.