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IMPORTANT UPDATE: this post has been deprecated, please refer to this post instead: exim4 and gmail
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to send email from command line (“mail -s subject recipient <content>”), you need:
- to install bsd-mailx package (sudo apt-get install bsd-mailx)
- at this point if you try to send an email, it won’t work (once you’ve sent it, chect /var/mail/<user> to see error msg (“cat /var/mail/$USER | less”), you should find a mailing to remote domains not supported error msg.
- it’s because you need a send mail program (sendmail, qmail, postfix, exim4? (=> best is either exim4 or postfix — qmail is outdated)), we will install exim4
- sudo apt-get install exim4
- now we need to configure exim4 to allow it to send emails. Since we’re on a home desktop computer, with dynamic ip-address, and since mail coming from dynamic-ip addresses are considered spam by some mail user agents, we will configure exim4 to send email through one of our email accounts (called “smarthost”), in our case gmail.
- edit /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf and set:
"dc_smarthost='smtp.gmail.com'" "dc_eximconfig_configtype='smarthost'"
- edit /etc/exim4/passwd.client and add the follownig two lines (without the second line, it did not work for me):
smtp.gmail.com : rdam...@gmail.com : passwd gmail-smtp.l.google.com : rdam...@gmail.com: passwd
- run “sudo update-exim4.conf”
- enable pop support (if not already done) in your gmail account (log into your account, click on “setting” / “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”, click on “enable pop” (any) then save changes
- try it: “mail -s “test” youremailaddress <your_content>” (ctrl+D on blank line to validate your body content) and watch your gmail account, you should have received your email by now (to debug ‘mail’ command, add ‘-v’ option)
summary
first enable pop support from your email account (gmail, hotmail, laposte.net…) , then run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install exim4 bsd-mailx
sudo vi /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf
-- set the following lines --
dc_eximconfig_configtype='smarthost'
dc_smarthost='smtp.gmail.com'
sudo vi /etc/exim4/passwd.client
-- set the following lines --
smtp.gmail.com : rdam...@gmail.com : passwd
gmail-smtp.l.google.com : rdam...@gmail.com: passwd
sudo update-exim4.conf
That should work by now.
[sources]
- http://www.esdebian.org/foro/19276/solucionadomailxmailing-to-remote-domains-not-supported exim4 configuration for send-only-and-only-from-localhost emails
- http://lwn.net/Articles/196664/ mail transport agent (mta) comparaison
- http://www.patoche.org/LTT/all/00000159.html idem
- http://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20050425.054747.17431cef.en.html useful faq to configure exim4 with gmail as smarthost
- http://groups.google.ca/group/linux.debian.user/msg/a1fa0e6356f8475c idem, complementary tut
- http://www.qc4blog.com/?p=305 new post with updated solution