This tutorial shows you how to configure your machine to send emails using a remote SMTP server, in the case of this tutorial we will use gmail’s SMTP server.

We will start by installing and configuring sSMTP:

cd /tmp
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/ssmtp/ssmtp_2.64-4_amd64.deb
dpkg -i ssmtp_*

We will also require the “mailutils” package (available by default on the majority of distro’s) but it wasn’t on mine, so we do:

apt-get install mailutils

Now we will configure the remote mail server settings:

nano /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

Example Configuration:

#
# Config file for sSMTP sendmail
#
# The person who gets all mail for userids < 1000
# Make this empty to disable rewriting.
root=postmaster

# The place where the mail goes. The actual machine name is required no
# MX records are consulted. Commonly mailhosts are named mail.domain.com
mailhub=mail

# Where will the mail seem to come from?
#rewriteDomain=

# The full hostname
hostname=myhostname

AuthUser=myusername@gmail.com
AuthPass=mypassword
FromLineOverride=YES
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
UseSTARTTLS=YES

It is also important to make sure that no other MTA’s are running, for example postifx, sendmail etc., you can do a quick check as follows:

netstat -tuna | grep 25

We can now send a test email in the following format:

echo "<subject>" | mail -s "<message>" <email-address>

e.g.

echo "My Subject" | mail -s "Hellow World!" myname@gmail.com

If you encounter any problems or are not receiving emails, re-check your configuration (I think Gmail requires you to enable SMTP access externally – I maybe wrong though.) and you can check the mail queue by using:

mailq

and debug problems by checking /var/log/mail.error or /var/log/mail.log