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Intro ∞

Sometimes there is a need to send an email via command line, or in a script (such as using PHP’s mail() method); but there is not an MTA (postfix, sendmail, etc) running on the machine. Note that while it is possible to set an MTA up as a gmail smarthost, they will be overkill for this simple scenario. The best program to use for this purpose is ssmtp – it accepts a mails stream from standard input and forwards the message to a remote MTA for processing.

Install ssmtp ∞

  1. Install ssmtp using your distro’s package manager 
    # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install ssmtp
# CentOS/RedHat/Fedora
sudo yum install ssmtp
  2. Disable sendmail (if enabled) 
    sudo service sendmail stop
sudo chkconfig sendmail off
mkdir /root/.sendmail_backup
mv /usr/sbin/sendmail /root/.sendmail_backup
  3. (Optional) Symlink ssmtp in place of sendmail 
    mv /usr/bin/sendmail /usr/bin/sendmail.orig
ln -s /usr/local/ssmtp/sbin/ssmtp /usr/sbin/sendmail

Configure ssmtp ∞

  1. Edit /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf, update the following settings: 
    AuthUser=email@gmail.com
AuthPass=Super_Secret_Password
FromLineOverride=YES
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
UseSTARTTLS=YES
  2. Test 
    echo "Test email body" | mail -s "Test Subject" email@domain.com

Credits ∞

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