To totally unlock this section you need to Log-in
Login
Wouldn’t it be useful if your computer could email you? We’d like to be notified by email when our own server is in trouble, but we don’t want to run our own mail server. sSMTP is perfect for this; it’s a simple way to send email from your system to an SMTP mail server, like Gmail’s.
Here’s how we set up sSMTP on Ubuntu to send mail through your own Gmail account.
Install sSMTP from the package ssmtp (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install ssmtp
sSMTP can be configured from one text file. Open /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf in a text editor:
sudo gedit /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf
The configuration file is very short and well commented by default. Here’s the options we use for sending mail through Gmail:
[email protected] mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587 AuthUser=mygmailusername AuthPass=mypassword UseSTARTTLS=YES
If you’re using Gmail, change the root, authuser, and authpass options to the email address, username, and password of your Google account. If you’re using another mail service you’ll need to change mailhub to the relevant SMTP server.
Once your configuration work is done, time to try sending some mail. The simplest way to do this is to run sSMTP in a terminal with a recipient email address:
ssmtp [email protected]
sSMTP will then wait for you to type your message, which needs to be formatted like this:
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: test email
hello world!
Note the blank like after the subject, everything after this line is the body of the email. When you’re finished, press Ctrl-D. sSMTP may take a few seconds to send the message before closing and turn back to your usual prompt.
Now it’s easy to write scripts which can send you mail. Here’s an example terminal command to send an email from the msg.txt text file:
ssmtp [email protected] < msg.txt
or
cat msg.txt | ssmtp [email protected]
msg.txt is a simple text using the proper formatting for sSMTP:
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: alert
The server is down!
 |  |