Sending Email From Your Linux System with sSMTP

A bit old, but still really useful, i used this method on a server. Article by Tom, first posted on Tombuntu

Wouldn’t it be useful if your computer could email you? I’d like to be notified by email when my server is in trouble, but I don’t want to run my 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 I set up sSMTP on Ubuntu to send mail through my Gmail account.



Install sSMTP from the package ssmtp (click the link to install on Debian/Ubuntu), 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 I use for sending mail through Gmail:
root=myemailaddress@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
AuthUser=mygmailusername
AuthPass=mypassword
UseSTARTTLS=YES
UseTLS=YES
AuthMethod=LOGIN # This is needed only for Gmail


If you’re using Gmail like I am, 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 recipient_email@example.com

sSMTP will then wait for you to type your message, which needs to be formatted like this:
To: recipient_email@example.com
From: myemailaddress@gmail.com
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.

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 myemailaddress@gmail.com < msg.txt

msg.txt is a simple text using the proper formatting for sSMTP:
To: myemailaddress@gmail.com
From: myemailaddress@gmail.com
Subject: alert

The server is down!

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