I fiddled with a couple of servers in the past weeks and one of the
things I needed immediately was email. I wanted to allow cron and the
webapps to send out emails.
The first thing I tried is Postfix. I couldn’t get it right from the first time and stepped away in frustration. I have a free Mailgun account, which already set up and running well. And so, I wanted some way to get the email to Mailgun, and everything would be fine from there. This was happening on Digital Ocean and so I googled frantically “digitalocean mailgun.”
One of the threads in the results mentioned sSMTP. It seemed to do
exactly what I needed: allow a system to send email out. Here is a
couple of snippets of its README:
This is sSMTP, a program that replaces sendmail on workstations that should send their mail via the departmental mailhub from which they pick up their mail (via pop, imap, rsmtp, pop_fetch, NFS… or the like). This program accepts mail and sends it to the mailhub, optionally replacing the domain in the From: line with a different one.
WARNING: the above is all it does. It does not receive mail, expand aliases or manage a queue. That belongs on a mailhub with a system administrator. […] It uses a minimum of external configuration information, and so can be installed by copying the (right!) binary and an optional four-line config file to a given machine.
here is one from its Debian page:
sSMTP is a simple MTA to deliver mail from a computer to a mail hub (SMTP server). sSMTP is simple and lightweight, there are no daemons or anything hogging up CPU; Just sSMTP. Unlike Exim4, sSMTP does not receive mail, expand aliases, or manage a queue.
I’ve tried it, it worked perfectly, and we became good friends. :-)
So next time when you need to send email out of a system, give it a try! 8-)