Is an MTA required?

[vasacampana]

Ubuntu 10, Joomla! 2.5.4, CiviCRM 4.1.0
I have configured crontab as in "CiviMail Installation" (sse attached file).

Syslog gives the following error:
Jun 11 10:30:01 www CRON[2593]: (sysman) CMD (php /var/www/crm/administrator/components/com_civicrm/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php)
Jun 11 10:30:01 www CRON[2590]: (CRON) error (grandchild #2593 failed with exit status 1)
Jun 11 10:30:01 www CRON[2590]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)

Really is a MTA required?
Thank you.

[xavier]

Well, if you have configured Civi to use the local MTA (the default), yes it is required.

You can configure it to use an external SMTP for outbound emails instead.

http://book.civicrm.org/user/initial-set-up/email-system-configuration

[xavier]

The way the test mail is sent is different than for civimail

1) try sending a normal email to a contact at gmail from civicrm

Is this works, the outbound is configured properly

2) check if you have a mailbox properly configured and added in civi

I would suggest you to really try to follow step by step the chapter in the document, that's easy to miss one and have a non functioning system and weird results.

X+