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.
+3
A:
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.
kmkaplan
2009-02-18 10:06:30
A:
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.
ShiDoiSi
2009-02-18 10:07:29
bad advice! a local mta spools messages, handles errors, retries delivery in case something goes wrong. all this your application would have to do itself if it talked smtp to a remote server.
hop
2009-02-18 10:48:14
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.
ShiDoiSi
2009-02-18 12:54:40
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.
hop
2009-02-18 17:43:18
also, configuring nullmailer takes exactly one entry for the admin address and one for the relay host. how much code does your "minimal" handling take, even in perl?
hop
2009-02-18 17:45:13
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.
ShiDoiSi
2009-02-22 23:41:50
but sendmail will return an error far less often, if ever. compare that to all the things that can go wrong with an smtp session.
hop
2009-02-26 02:53:19
+2
A:
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
chburd
2009-02-18 10:07:58
for this kind of application, something even simpler than postfix or qmail would probably be better. look into nullmailer, mstmp, ssmtp, etc.
hop
2009-02-18 10:51:43
Probably - I was thinking of a notification email for an admin. There's a whole lot of reasons to send a "one-off" email, and most of them are good.
David Thornley
2009-02-18 17:45:06
A:
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.
sweeney
2009-02-18 17:58:23