I used to sift trough my shell history and bookmarks every time set up sending email on a new Debian or Ubuntu server. This should help everybody who just wants to send email trough an old school ISP or free email service.
Be aware don't use ssmtp anymore. It's unmaintained and has been removed
from Debian
and Ubuntu will most definitely follow suit.
Install msmtp
First we need the awesome program called msmtp to route all the server's mail through a standard SMTP server.
sudo apt-get install msmtp msmtp-mta mailutils
Set up msmtp
sudo nano /etc/msmtprc
# Set default values for all following accounts.
defaults
# Use the mail submission port 587 instead of the SMTP port 25.
port 587
# Always use TLS.
tls on
# Set a list of trusted CAs for TLS. The default is to use system settings, but
# you can select your own file.
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
# The SMTP server of your ISP
account isp
host mail.isp.example
from [email protected]
auth on
user 12345
# Set default account to isp
account default: isp
# Map local users to mail addresses
aliases /etc/aliases
The above is based on the example. The program has many more authentication methods.
Install and set up mailx
In order to be able to use the mail command wee need to install mailx
sudo apt-get install bsd-mailx
Set mail transport agent to use msmtp
sudo nano /etc/mail.rc
append the following:
set mta=/usr/bin/msmtp
Set up aliases
We need to link system users with email addresses in order for system users to receive mails from cronjobs.
sudo nano /etc/aliases
# Send root to Jane
root: [email protected]
# Send everything else to admin
default: [email protected]
sudo nano /etc/mail.rc
append:
alias root root<[email protected]>
Emails are now sent to this address if e.g. a cronjob fails. Also a general fallback address is used if messages don't belong to root. Of course more users can be set.
Test it!
echo "Hello World" | msmtp -d [email protected]
Test sending a mail to root
echo "Testing msmtp from ${HOSTNAME} with mail command" | mail -s "hi root" root
Test sending a mail to another email adress
echo "Testing msmtp from ${HOSTNAME} with mail command" | mail -s "hi there" [email protected]