Send system email with Gmail and sSMTP

First, let’s make sure that you have Mutt installed to send emails

sudo -i
apt install mutt

Next, let’s make sure root has an email directory.

touch /var/mail/root

Required Packages

Luckily, installing this on Debian/Ubuntu is dead simple.

 apt-get install ssmtp

Then, you’ll need to edit your ssmtp.conf file. If you have two factor authentication turned on, I’d just you create a one-time password for this in Gmail and use that as the password below.

nano /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

and paste something like this in.

root=GmailUsername@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
rewriteDomain=gmail.com
hostname=fileserver.local
TLS_CA_FILE=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
UseTLS=YES
UseSTARTTLS=YES
AuthUser=GmailUsername
AuthPass=GmailPassword
AuthMethod=LOGIN
FromLineOverride=YES

* Press crtl+x, and then y to save and exit. Then add each account that you want to be able to send mail from by editing,

 nano /etc/ssmtp/revaliases

and paste…

root:GmailUsername@gmail.com:smtp.gmail.com:587
youruser:GmailUsername@gmail.com:smtp.gmail.com:587

Just replace youruser with your Ubuntu username and GmailUsername@gmail.com with your Gmail address. That’s it 🙂

Conclusion
Try a test email with Mutt.

mutt

This is a command line email client, so it’s not “quite” as flashy as the web-based Gmail client. Here are the steps.

  1. At the first screen with the blue bars at the top and bottom, press m for a new email.
  2. Next, type in the email address that you’d like to send the email to at the bottom of the screen, and press ENTER when you are done.
  3. Next, type the Subject for your email as TEST EMAIL FROM MUTT and press ENTER again.
  4. Then, it will load up a Nano screen for you to type your email.
  5. Type in the contents of your email.
  6. When you are done, press Ctrl+x, then y to confirm the email and exit.

When everything is setup, you will see a screen like this.

y:Send  q:Abort  t:To  c:CC  s:Subj  a:Attach file  d:Descrip  ?:Help
    From: root 
      To: testemail@gmail.com
      Cc:
     Bcc:
 Subject: TEST EMAIL FROM MUTT
Reply-To:
     Fcc: ~/sent
     Mix: 
Security: None

-- Attachments
- I     1 /tmp/mutt-frontend-0-4010345-16456953681                                                                                                        [text/plain, 7bit, us-ascii, 0.1K]

-- Mutt: Compose  [Approx. msg size: 0.1K   Atts: 1]-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Press y to send the test email. If it worked, it will say sending Message at the bottom of the screen, followed by Mail sent. Press q to exit Mutt.

Now that this is configured, you can use this for any system alerts you might have.

  1. SnapRAID Sync Script
  2. Hard drive space usage
  3. mdadm
  4. cron jobs
  5. etc.

Zack

I love learning new things and trying out the latest technology.

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