I want to send out one off emails from a linux server. The server does not need to receive emails back.
Is there a simpler solution than sendmail for sending outgoing emails only?
I would prefer to use Perl to send the email.
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7 Answers
Calling out to /usr/lib/sendmail is usually the preferred method because it handles delivery problems correctly. This does not mean using sendmail. Most (all?) mail transport system provide a command that's just named sendmail and provides an interface compatible to the original.
Alternatively you can send directly through a SMTP relay using a package like Net::SMTP but be extra sure to correctly cater for delivery problems.
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Sendmail is not the only choice. you can use Postfix, Qmail, and many others
my Perl scripts call the mailx command. to know how to use it, type 'man mailx' However this require to have a MTA correclty configured.
Or you can just use the Net::SMTP perl library and use your smtp server of choice
I find nullmailer a very useful solution for the described scenario. Nullmailer is a sendmail/qmail/etc replacement MTA which relays to a fixed set of mail servers. It is very simple to configure and consumes little resources.
One important advantage of nullmailer over other mentioned solutions like mstmp and ssmtp is that it maintains a queue of emails to be sent. The application sending the mail is blocked only a very short time while the mail is queued (milliseconds). The sending of the mail happens in the context of a another process. Solutions like mstmp and ssmtp don't maintain a queue of email. The sending happens in the context of the application, thereby blocking the application. Sending an email this way can easily take 1 to 2 seconds or longer. This may not be a problem in many cases but can become a problem if the email is sent by a web application.
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Gabe
Installing nullmailer on unbuntu: ubuntublog.ch/applikationen/nullmailer-unter-ubuntu (german article but commands should be understandable by anyone)
You do not need a mail transport agent (MTA) instance on the machine doing the sending if you have another mailserver already running in your organization: you can make Perl deliver the email through SMTP to that server, so there's no need for having (another) MTA like sendmail on "your" machine.
7 Comments
Volker Stolz
I disagree: a local MTA requires administration. If it is not properly done, this will just brush any problems under the carpet. I don't see anything wrong with delivering to a smarthost. If the smarthost has a problem, you just need minimal intervention/error handling on the Perl side.
a unix system without a working (outgoing) mta is not a properly configured unix system anyway! it's not just your little application that wants to send email: there's all sorts of cron jobs, etc that depend on it. on most linux distribution you can't even deinstall the mta without a --force.
Volker Stolz
There's no difference in checking the exit code of /usr/lib/sendmail or that of the perl library, error handling is required in both cases.
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I'm fond of creating a gmail or other free account and then using the java mail api in J2EE to send messages (from your new gmail account) to whoever... Typically i'll create a Mailer class which can be constructed with a default constructor and then give it a send(String dest, String subj, String body[, Obj attach...if you want]) and then in your case you might wrap the thing in a main method so that you can call it from else with some command line args, or call from within some java program. If you interested i'll shoot you the code.
