Sending Email from a Linux machine

Sending a notification email from a server to a remote address is a very common requirement. If all you want to do is send email and not receive any (from local or remote sources) then installing good old sendmail is overkill.

A simple alternative is to install ssmtp. On ubuntu:

$ sudo aptitude install ssmtp

and then edit /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf. Here is an example configuration that uses a Gmail account for relaying:

#
# Config file for sSMTP sendmail
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
AuthUser=youraccount@example.com
AuthPass=yourpassword
UseSTARTTLS=YES
# The full hostname of this machine
hostname=yourhost.example.com
# Allow users to set their own From: address?
FromLineOverride=YES

You send mail using /usr/sbin/ssmtp just as you would with sendmail, but without any of the sendmail.cf configuration business.

As a bonus, ssmtp sets up symlinks for /usr/lib/sendmail and /usr/sbin/sendmail such that if you have an existing script that calls sendmail it will probably work as is one a system with ssmtp installed.

Here is a ssmtp man page.