Introduction
SSMTP is a tool that delivers emails from a computer or a server to a configured mail host.
SSMTP is not an email server itself and does not receive emails or manage a queue.
One of its primary uses is for forwarding automated email (like system alerts) off your machine and to an external email address.
Prerequisites
You would need the following things in order to be able to complete this tutorial successfully:
Installing SSMTP
In order to install SSMTP you’ll need to first update your apt cache with:
Then run the following command to install SSMTP:
Another thing that you would need to install is mailutils
, to do that run the following command:
- sudo apt install mailutils
Configuring SSMTP
Now that you have ssmtp
installed, in order to configure it to use your SMTP server when sending emails you need to edit the SSMTP configuration file.
Using your favourite text editor opent the /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf
file:
- sudo nano /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf
You need to incldue the your SMTP configuration:
root=postmaster
mailhub=your_smtp_host.com:587
hostname=your_hostname
AuthUser=your_gmail_username@your_smtp_host.com
AuthPass=your_gmail_password
FromLineOverride=YES
UseSTARTTLS=YES
Save the file and exit.
Sending emails with SSMTP
Once your configuration is done, in order to send an email just run the following command:
- echo "Here add your email body" | mail -s "Here specify your email subject" your_recepient_email@yourdomain.com
You can run this directly in your terminal or include it in your bash scripts.
Sending A File with SSMTP (optional)
If you need to send files as attachments, you can use mpack
.
To install mpack
run the following command:
Next, in order to send an email with a file attached, run the following command
- mpack -s "Your Subject here" your_file.zip your_recepient_email@yourdomain.com
The above command would send an email to your_recepient_email@yourdomain.com
with the your_file.zip
attached.
Conclusion
SSMTP is a great and reliable way to implement SMTP email functionality directly in bash scripts.
For more information about SSMTP I would recommend checking the official documentation here.
Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Bobby