The mgetty-1.1.14-policy.patch which changes the default MAIL_TO from "faxadmin" to "root" is unnecessary, and takes away from flexibility of the overall system. Most people probably do not want an e-mail sent to root every time a fax comes in. In a large installation, this could become very burdensome. Rather than put the responsibility on the mail client to filter all these messages out, why not just send all fax mail to "faxadmin"? (as mgetty was smartly designed to do so in the first place). Redhat has already gone to the trouble of making an /etc/aliases file with entries for system, admin, postmaster, etc. Since this mechanism is alredy in place, the simple addition of another line in /etc/alaises, ala faxadmin: root would make a working fax system much more usable. The admin could very easily send the fax mails to root, another user, /dev/null, or a number of any other things. Compiling in MAIL_TO=root makes sending the mail anywhere other than to root very hard!! It seems silly to need to use procmail or other filtering mechanisms if you don't want root to get hundreds of e-mails about mgetty recieving faxes. K. Brant Niggemyer
The file /etc/aliases, in the sendmail package, is marked %config(noreplace). What that means is, if I add faxadmin as an alias and compile MAILTO=faxadmin into mgetty, is that mail to faxadmin will break on upgrades. I'm going to punt and leave MAILTO=root because at least the mail gets through even though that requires root to use a filter. You can, of course, apply the patch to mgetty and recompile. Red Hat can't do this because of the way sendmail is packaged.