E-mail notifications from yum-updatesd

After wrestling with yum-updatesd in a rather confused manner for some time, I finally discovered why it wasn’t e-mailing me notifications of updates; it needs the dbus service (messagebus) to be running, even if you are not using emit_via=dbus and with dbus_listener=false.

With the messagebus service running so that yum-updatesd could connect to the dbus service it didn’t need to use, it is just a case of setting emit_via=email and then adjusting the email_from, email_to and smtp_server settings in /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf appropriately.