I am trying to set up the most simple email server on an Amazon Linux 2 host for simple outbound mail (e.g. sending system messages). Following instructions on the net, I have installed mailx and sendmail. I am not committed to either package, I just want a simple setup with a minimal footprint. I have no problem switching to postfix if that is a better solution.
For configuration I have made the following changes.
/etc/sysconfig/sendmail:
DAEMON=no
/etc/mail/submit.cf (hostname obfuscated):
D{MTAHost}smtp.******.com
This works fine, and I am able to receive mail that is sent from the system.
There is a wrinkle. The anacron process is sending mail to the root account. However, rather than the mail being kept internal to the system it is being sent to the SMTP server. The SMTP server sends the message back to my host, which doesn't accept mail, and a loop is created when an 'undeliverable' message is send back to root on the host that doesn't accept mail.
How can I configure my system so email to root stays local and is not sent to the SMTP server? Any other 'best practices' suggestions would be welcome as well. And again, if switching to postfix is better, I am willing to do so (but will need configuration guidance).
I have question script for running forward my own email (do not have autoforward facility) to my Gmail. I want to do it using phpmailer.
So I can make cronjobs for running php script everyday (running get email and forwading to my Gmail).
How can I go forward with this?
PHPmailer alone will not be able to help you with forwarding as it is only a transfer class, for outgoing emails. You will need to set up a mail server (like Postfix) with an email handler (like Dovecot) if you are in Linux to receive incoming emails. PHPmailer can be used for the forwarding process but there are other solutions.
I recommend you look into a service like mailgun.com instead. They have a routing feature for forwarding incoming emails that is very easy to set up (if you have dns access to your current email domain). You can send 10k emails for free each month with the service.
My VM-Ware VM running Debian 6 doesn't send emails since I moved to another house with another modem/router. I did a complete reinstall of Debian, but still I can't send email. My network adapter is set to 'Bridged' (with 'Replicate physical network connection state' enabled).
I installed an application that needs to send an email to work properly. But I can't finish it because I don't receive an email at all.
date | mail test#example.com on the command-line also doesn't work, so it hasn't something to do with the application.
Do I need to configure my router in order to send external emails from my VM?
I managed to solve the mailing-problems!
I needed to do two things:
Setting up a SMTP-server for Postfix because my ISP doesn't allow usage of port 25 without using their SMTP-server. See this reference for a how-to.
Then I needed to configure a 'send-from adress', because by default emails are sent from a localhost email adress. The SMTP-server doesn't recognizes this as valid and prevents the email from being sent. See this reference for a how-to.
It cost me almost a few days to solve it, but now I can receive outgoing emails from my Debian system :).
For our web projects, we need a reliable e-mail distribution mechanism. Due to bad experiences in the past, I have written a bash script (executed hourly) which sends a notification e-mail if
the qmail-send process is not running
there are too many failures in the mail log
For sending the notification e-mail I obviously don't want to depend on qmail, since qmail will be unavailable if the qmail-send process is not running. However, the following command sends the notification e-mail via qmail:
echo "failure rate critical" | mail -s "qmail notification" my#email.com
What's the easiest way to send e-mail from the linux command line without qmail? Can I use sendmail?
If you guys have smarter alarm systems to monitor qmail, please let me know.
Invoke the /usr/sbin/sendmail binary. It is usually available no matter which MTA you use and you can be sure it supports the standard sendmail interface if it's named sendmail.
The easiest way to use it is invoking sendmail -t and then writing the email including a valid To header to its stdin. If you omit -t you'll have to pass the recipient address as a commandline argument.
Another solution would be using SMTP but if you need to send emails from a bash script this is clearly a bad solution as there are no standard libraries in Bash which contain functions to send an email over smtp (unlike in python where you cannot easily send mails using sendmail but over SMTP).
You have a mail utility in POSIX. If you're only for linux, sendmail is ok (but then you rely on the system's (mis)configuration, right?).
All in all, SMTP protocol is not that difficult. I'd say you can talk in pure SMTP. It's about four commands to issue for a trivial mail. And it's portable:)
But if there are complications it may result in PITA...
I have a computer at home which I can't access from work. I'd like to be able to view results from work that my home computer produces. The best idea I've come up with is an automated script running on my home computer that emails myself the results (from a text file or stderr/out) when complete.
I'm decent with bash (I have a linux machine) and java, so an answer using either or both of those would be ideal, but if there's something easier that's fine too.
I typically use gmail, but also have yahoo mail.
My question is this: what would be the basic steps in solving this problem? I can do the nitty gritty stuff, but can't really get the big picture of how something like this would work.
Please help.
jbu
Howto set up ssmtp to send through a Gmail account
Some of the steps here might seem strange at first, but the rationale is put
in footnotes that should hopefully explain why.
First create a spare account on gmail which you will only use for
sending email. For instance, if your normal account is user#gmail.com,
create an account user.noreply#gmail.com with a newly created password
which you only will use for this account [1].
Set up the new account to forward all email to the normal account [2]
and under account settings you should add all other email adresses you
use [3].
Then install ssmtp (On Debian: aptitude install ssmtp) and edit ssmtp's configuration file /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf:
root=user#gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
UseSTARTTLS=YES
AuthUser=user.noreply
AuthPass=passwdusedonlyforthisaccount
FromLineOverride=YES
and configure the local mail delivery by editing /etc/ssmtp/revaliases
assuming that your local login is localuser:
root:user#gmail.com:smtp.gmail.com:587
localuser:user#gmail.com:smtp.gmail.com:587
Make sure the two configuration files are readable to all users who
should be able to send email [4].
Test the setup by e.g. mailx (On Debian: aptitude install bsd-mailx):
echo 'testing, one, two' | mailx -s 'test 1' user#gmail.com
Hope this helps.
[1] The new gmail user name and password will be visible to everyone who
can log onto your machine, so you do not want this account to be
critical in any way, meaning you can close it down immediately if
someone should get access to it.
[2] If some email you sent bounces back to you, you might want to know
about it, and there actually exists people who will happily reply to an
email from johnsmith.noreply.
[3] Gmail will rewrite the From header on the email if it does not recognise the address.
[4] Ssmtp runs as the local user who sends the email, so that user needs
read access to the configuration files.
On any Linux I have used the mail sending from command-line is simple:
mail -s "My subject here" recipient#wherever.com <message_body.txt
AFAIK this acts as a front-end to sendmail, and you have to have sendmail configured to forward the messages to your ISP mail server.
You can't access your home computer from work which rules out a "remote support" option.
Can you access other computers on the Internet? If so, you could simply set up one of the online storage options and then ftp the results from your home computer. That's a lot simpler then trying to write scripts or code to generate emails with attachments or whatever.
You could then view the external computer from work.
If you have netcat, this command will send you an e-mail:
Given a file in this format (from Wikipedia):
HELO relay.example.org
MAIL FROM:<bob#example.org>
RCPT TO:<alice#example.com>
RCPT TO:<theboss#example.com>
DATA
From: "Bob Example" <bob#example.org>
To: Alice Example <alice#example.com>
Cc: theboss#example.com
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:02:43 -0500
Subject: Test message
Hello Alice.
This is a test message with 5 headers and 4 lines in the body.
Your friend,
Bob
.
QUIT
Then netcat it to an SMTP server you have access to:
nc mail.somewhere.com 25 < file.txt
This will then send the e-mail. You can see how you can create a Java program to do this for you (just execute the commands).
Traditionaly, with unix systems like Linux, you'd have an MTA, a mail transfer agent, on the computer that deals with sending e-mail.
This could be a full blown e-mail server like exim, or something simple like ssmtp that just sends messages on to a relaying SMTP server such as would be provided by your ISP.
This isn't neccessarily the case anymore, since mail clients like Thunderbird include their own MTA, much like mail clients on Windows do.
However, it is likely that your distro will install some MTA or other by default, if for no other reason than the fact that other things on your system, like cron, want to be able to send e-mail. Generally there will be a command line tool called sendmail (sendmail being the original MTA [citation needed], other MTAs maintain compatability with its interface and it has sort of become the standard) that can be used from a shell script to send an e-mail.
My solution assumes that you have a SMTP server available which allows you to send an email programmatically. Alternatively, you can use a local install of sendmail which generally is available with most linux distros.
Create a standalone java program which watches the directory your home computer saves the file to. Use the JavaMail API to attach and send the file to any email you wish.
If you're also familiar with the Spring Framework, it has a nice abstraction layer for working with JavaMail and makes this sort of thing trivial.
Of course, your home ISP probably has the common SMTP port blocked as well.