Ubuntu – How to setup sendmail, postfix, or dovecot so that perl can send emails

emailperlserver

Direct Question: I want to enable Perl to send emails. What package(s) should I install to setup a simplistic email server: no need for incoming, only outgoing. I can forward through gmail's SMTP if that's best?

Background: I am programmer with a nightly build script written in Perl. I would like to email myself the results of my nightly builds (especially if there's an error).

I've read about the perl package Mail::Sendmail briefly, but if something else is more appropriate, please tell me!!

I tried the simple aptget install sendmail, but that doesn't seem to work. I get the following errors:

Server said: 421 4.3.0 collect: Cannot write ./dfp1PFXl7W020719 (bfcommit, uid=0, gid=120): No such file or directory
message transmission error (421 4.3.0 collect: Cannot write ./dfp1PFXl7W020719 (bfcommit, uid=0, gid=120): No such file or directory
)
Server said: 421 4.3.0 collect: Cannot write ./dfp1PFXl7W020719 (bfcommit, uid=0, gid=120): No such file or directory

I've googled this problem a bit and tried a few things — adding my username to /etc/mail/trusted-users and such, but to no avail.

In other words, I would be most grateful if you could provide simple instructions for setting up an outgoing mail server. I really don't understand the specifics, but as I understand, I need to forward the mail through an existing SMTP server — so I can use my gmail account if need be (that's where I want to send the logs anyway). Any suggestions would be most greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

All of them are too much tool for the job. ssmtp does this - but only this.

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

(This will remove postfix or sendmail if installed.)

sudoedit /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

And the contents of that file:

Root=your_email@gmail.com
Mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:465
RewriteDomain=gmail.com
AuthUser=your_gmail_username # (before the @gmail.com part)
AuthPass=your_gmail_password
FromLineOverride=Yes
UseTLS=Yes

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Ubuntu – Lightweight local mail transfer agent

What you are looking for is Nullmailer. Simple and lightweight with almost no configuration. Check this post:

http://www.htpcbeginner.com/lightweight-mail-server-for-linux-nullmailer-mta/

It has been a perfect solution for my self-hosted Ubuntu server. Hope this helps!

Ubuntu – Sending Emails from existing SMTP host from Ubuntu Server

If you mean that you are sending e-mail through a third-party SMTP server (provided by your ISP, for example), then you can install ssmtp, which is a drop-in replacement for Postfix/Sendmail but specialised to that precise task of sending mail through a remote SMTP, and is thus much easier to configure. Then you can send e-mail with the mailx command, for example:

echo "Mail." | mailx -s "Subject" recipient@somewhere.org

EDIT: E-mail is a very complicated business... Some things to keep in mind:

Note that the command above does not specify a sender address (i.e., the addres that the recipient will see in the "From" field of his e-mail client). By default, the sender address is your login name on your local machine, followed by @, followed by the full hostname of the local machine. For example on my machine, the login name is firas and the hostname is nomo:

firas@nomo ~ % whoami
firas
firas@nomo ~ % hostname -f
nomo

So when I send an email with the above command, the sender address will be firas@nomo, as can be seen from mail.log:

firas@nomo ~ % tail -n 3 /var/log/mail.log
Jun  9 20:37:46 nomo sSMTP[2203]: Creating SSL connection to host
Jun  9 20:37:48 nomo sSMTP[2203]: SSL connection using RSA_AES_128_CBC_SHA1
Jun  9 20:37:50 nomo sSMTP[2203]: Sent mail for firas@nomo (221 2.0.0 esmtp3.es.uci.edu closing connection) uid=1000 username=firas outbytes=364

The vast majority of servers will refuse to relay this e-mail (as an anti-spam measure), because the domain name nomo is not a valid domain. Fortunately, there is an option in ssmtp.conf which lets one specify an arbitrary domain, which sSMTP will use when sending mail. Namely, this is the rewritedomain option, so if I have this in my ssmtp.conf:

rewriteDomain=fkraiem.org

then the sender address will be firas@fkraiem.org.

Normally, the above should be sufficient (that is, as long as your sender address has a valid domain, the server should relay your mail). However, some e-mail providers are extra zealous, and will only permit you to use the e-mail address you have registered with them. This means that in addition to changing the domain name as above, you might need to either change your login name on the local machine, or register a new address with your provider (if they allow it), so that the final address will match your registered address.

Another way to specify an arbitrary sender address is to set the fromlineoverride option of ssmtp.conf to YES, and then use the -a option of mailx:

echo "Mail." | mailx -s "Subject" -a 'From: firas@fkraiem.org' firas@fkraiem.org

This is however non-standard, and might not work on OSes other than Ubuntu (and other GNU-based systems). One may also use other, more sophisticated clients, such as mutt.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Lightweight local mail transfer agent

Ubuntu – Sending Emails from existing SMTP host from Ubuntu Server

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