Eben King wrote:

I wrote a script around "ssmtp" which allowed me to fire off emails to
myself from cron. Short things, like "empty the litterbox" or whatever,
just a few words. Well, ssmtp is unmaintained and I can't get it to work reliably with my email server (which is not gmail). What can I use to replace it, or should I just find a way to get a real MUA to send a message for me?

Every MTA, real or not, should supply a binary claiming to be
sendmail which can be used for things like that.

Exim and Postfix are very very common and can easily be run with
set-and-forget configs for this kind of purpose. There are even
smaller MTAs available.

-dsr-

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* Greg <curtyshoo@gmail.com> [25-04/30=Wed 15:59 -0000]:

On 2025-04-30, Eben King <eben@gmx.us> wrote:

I wrote a script around "ssmtp" which allowed me to fire off emails to myself from cron. Short things, like "empty the litterbox" or whatever, just a few words. Well, ssmtp is unmaintained and I can't get it to
work reliably with my email server (which is not gmail). What can I use
to replace it, or should I just find a way to get a real MUA to send a message for me?

msmtp?

I'm running exim4, and
echo "$msg"|mail -s"$msg" $USER
works for me. You may need to configure /etc/mailname
with a single line containing your local domain.

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On Wed, Apr 30, 2025 at 15:21:26 -0400, Eben King wrote:

I guess I don't currently have an MTA.

eben@cerberus:~$ type sendmail
bash: type: sendmail: not found
1

The sendmail program (or symlink) lives in /usr/sbin which is probably
not in your PATH as user eben. (There's also a historic /usr/lib/sendmail location that you may see, but I don't think Debian does that.)

ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail

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