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  • Re: sending short emails

    From Dan Ritter@21:1/5 to Eben King on Wed Apr 30 19:10:01 2025
    Eben King wrote:
    I wrote a script around "ssmtp" which allowed me to fire off emails to
    myself from cron. Short things, like "empty the litterbox" or whatever,
    just a few words. Well, ssmtp is unmaintained and I can't get it to work reliably with my email server (which is not gmail). What can I use to replace it, or should I just find a way to get a real MUA to send a message for me?

    Every MTA, real or not, should supply a binary claiming to be
    sendmail which can be used for things like that.

    Exim and Postfix are very very common and can easily be run with
    set-and-forget configs for this kind of purpose. There are even
    smaller MTAs available.

    -dsr-

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  • From Will Mengarini@21:1/5 to All on Wed Apr 30 18:40:01 2025
    * Greg <[email protected]> [25-04/30=Wed 15:59 -0000]:
    On 2025-04-30, Eben King <[email protected]> wrote:
    I wrote a script around "ssmtp" which allowed me to fire off emails to myself from cron. Short things, like "empty the litterbox" or whatever, just a few words. Well, ssmtp is unmaintained and I can't get it to
    work reliably with my email server (which is not gmail). What can I use
    to replace it, or should I just find a way to get a real MUA to send a message for me?


    msmtp?

    I'm running exim4, and
    echo "$msg"|mail -s"$msg" $USER
    works for me. You may need to configure /etc/mailname
    with a single line containing your local domain.

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  • From Greg Wooledge@21:1/5 to Eben King on Wed Apr 30 21:30:01 2025
    On Wed, Apr 30, 2025 at 15:21:26 -0400, Eben King wrote:
    I guess I don't currently have an MTA.

    eben@cerberus:~$ type sendmail
    bash: type: sendmail: not found
    1

    The sendmail program (or symlink) lives in /usr/sbin which is probably
    not in your PATH as user eben. (There's also a historic /usr/lib/sendmail location that you may see, but I don't think Debian does that.)

    ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail

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