I’m looking for a simple sendmail replacement to receive local mail, such as from cron and service failures and forward it to on to a real SMTP server.
I have used msmtpd
successfully but thought I’d ask if folks have other solutions they like.
msmtp
never failed meThe one problem with msmtp is that it doesn’t rewrite headers, like “From: root / To: root”. These are not required for SMTP, but they are required by some mail providers who will reject email that doesn’t have an “@” sign in these headers. The author or msmtp has said he does not plan to add this feature.
I worked around the issue with my own sendmail wrapper that rewrites local addresses in From and To headers before passing the message to msmtp. Someone else posted such a script in this bug report:
You can definitely replace senders with correct mail addresses for relaying through SMTP servers that expect them (this is what I do):
# /etc/msmtprc account default ... host smtp.gmail.com auto_from on auth on user myaddress password hunter2 # Replace local recipients with addresses in the aliases file aliases /etc/aliases
# /etc/aliases mailer-daemon: postmaster postmaster: root nobody: root hostmaster: root usenet: root news: root webmaster: root www: root ftp: root abuse: root noc: root security: root root: default www-data: root default: myaddress@gmail.com
(the only thing I changed from the defaults in the aliases file is adding the last line)
This makes it so all/most system accounts susceptible to send mail are aliased to root, and root in turn is aliased to my email address (which is the one configured in
host/user/password
in msmtprc)Edit: I think it’s actually the
auto_from
option which interests you. Check the msmtp manpageIn the issue I linked, the msmtp author makes a distinction with changing the envelope recipient, which msmtp can do, with rewriting the email headers like “To”, which msmtp does not do.
https://github.com/chriswayg/ansible-msmtp-mailer/issues/14 While msmtp has features to alter the envelope sender and recipient, it doesn’t alter the “To:” or “From:” message itself. When the Envelope doesn’t match these details, it can be considered spam
Oh I didn’t know that, good to know!
The proposed one-line wrapper looks like a nice solution
After testing ssmtp, nullmailer, and msmtp for relay-only outgoing mail on Fedora #Linux. Here’s my final report:
- ssmtp is packaged for Fedora and I got it working, but the Ansible role I found for it had been abandoned by the author because ssmtp itself is unmaintained.
- nullmailer might have worked, but is not packaged for Fedora.
- msmtp worked. I used this Ansible role, after patching it to work on Fedora: https://github.com/chriswayg/ansible-msmtp-mailer