martin kavec

Hi,

I am trying to setup simple (not for me) emailing on my gentoo desktop. it's
purpose should only be to notify me by email that something is happening on
the system. By something I mean, at the moment, possible hard-drive failure,
which I monitor by smartmontools. I want, simply be able to send an email
from one user to another user on the same machine.

This is my first attempt to set up emailing. I have been googloing for a while
but all the solutions I found used sendmail, postfix ... Is there any
relatively simple solution for this task? What is the minimum I need to have
installed.

As suggested by smartmontools, I installed mailx. I can see
from /var/log/messages that mailx succeds in sending the email but than

sSMTP[19555]: Unable to locate mail
sSMTP[19555]: Cannot open mail:25

Thanks for help.

Martin

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mike noble

ssmtp is looking for a machine called mail. ssmptp is a send-only, what
this means is that it can't be used to receive mail. It's instention is
that if you have a centeral mail hub(server) ssmtp would send mail to
that machine for delivery. If you want mail to be sent and recieved on
the same machine, you need to use an actual MTA like sendmail or
postfix, there are others.
From the man page of ssmtp:
DESCRIPTION
ssmtp is a send-only sendmail emulator for machines which
normally pick
their mail up from a centralized mailhub (via pop, imap, nfs
mounts or
other means). It provides the functionality required for
humans and
programs to send mail via the standard or /usr/bin/mail user agents.

It accepts a mail stream on standard input with recipients
specified on
the command line and synchronously forwards the message to
the mail
transfer agent of a mailhub for the mailhub MTA to process.
Failed mes-
sages are placed in dead.letter in the sender's home directory.

The configuration files for ssmtp are:
/etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf - configuration file
/etc/ssmtp/revaliases - reverse aliases file

I use ssmtp on gentoo, but I have a second machine which actually is a
mail server and has sendmail running. I then connect to the other
machine via IMAP to get my mail, the other machine also uses fetchmail
to get mail from my ISP.
I will not go into advantages or disavantages of any mail MTA's such
as sendmail or postfix. I have been using sendmail for years and
know it rather well (at least for what I need), when I learned sendmail,
it was the only MTA available.

Mike

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