Sending a mail from a linux shell script

Question

I want to send an email from a Linux Shell script. What is the standard command to do this and do I need to set up any special server names?

Answer 1

Generally, you'd want to use mail command to send your message using local MTA (that will either deliver it using SMTP to the destination or just forward it into some more powerful SMTP server, for example, at your ISP). If you don't have a local MTA (although it's a bit unusual for a UNIX-like system to omit one), you can either use some minimalistic MTA like ssmtp.

ssmtp is quite easy to configure. Basically, you'll just need to specify where your provider's SMTP server is:

# The place where the mail goes. The actual machine name is required
# no MX records are consulted. Commonly mailhosts are named mail.domain.com
# The example will fit if you are in domain.com and you mailhub is so named.
mailhub=mail

Another option is to use one of myriads scripts that just connect to SMTP server directly and try to post a message there, such as Smtp-Auth-Email-Script, smtp-cli, SendEmail, etc.