Installing ssmtp in RedHat/CentOS

I like ssmtp, and yes it has an extra "s" compared to smtp server. There are a lot of MTAs out there with tons of features and tweaks and so on. I myself setup and deployed postfix in quite a few organizations and never had reason to regret it. But, postfix, sendmail, and all the others are full-fledged enterprise level MTAs. Sometimes all you need is to be able to send a couple of emails from servers whenever they have something interesting to tell you ("who is banging my ssh port?" "where's my tea?"). Take CentOS, for instance. If you are not careful, it will put postfix in every single desktop you install it on. Who needs postfix in their desktop when they probably have access to a perfectly good server class mail server thingie (which could even be postfix, mind you)?

So, enter ssmtp. It is small. You can even say it is rather limited and not particularly secure. But, if all you want is to know if some machine, say, finished a batch job or added a new user and can work around its limitations, you might want to check it out.

Installing ssmtp

As I mentioned in the title, we will be installing ssmtp in some RedHat/CentOS machine. That will require to configure the box to use additional repositories. You can check if your favourite one has it; I myself like epel and know ssmtp is there. repoforge (used to be called rpmforge) might have it too. How do you add a repository? I will let you figure out.

First thing we need to do is remove postfix just in case it is there:

yum remove postfix

Then we do some ssmtp adding:

yum install ssmtp --enablerepo=epel

Now we need to configure it. To do so you need a real smtp server; all ssmtp does is forward email to a proper MTA. Let's say your mail server is mail.domain.com. If you do not need to authenticate against it (it accepts unauthenticated email only from certain machines or your LAN), you could probable get away with this:

cat > /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf  << EOF
# Config file for sSMTP sendmail  
root=postmaster
mailhub=mail.domain.com
hostname=$(hostname -f)
FromLineOverride=yes
#UseTLSCert=YES
#TLSCert=/etc/pki/tls/private/ssmtp.pem
#Debug=YES
UseSTARTTLS=yes
EOF

I will be rushing over the not-so-many settings in ssmtp because they are well explained somewhere else. What I will do is stop at the ones I think you might find interesting; at least I do:

• UseSTARTTLS: if your smtp server can do TLS, by all means use it! Or SSL! ssmtp can handle that too; check the man pages!.
  
• mailhub: this is as you guessed the address for the smtp server. The nice thing about it is that you can not only define the name but also the port, in case you are not using port 25. Here are a few examples:
  • mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
    
  • mailhub=mail
    
  • mailhub=host363.hostmonster.com:465
  Bonus points if you recognize the ports. Here is a full example assuming you are a cox customer (I based the setup on their email setup notes) connecting using port 25 (insecure) without any auth whatsoever:

  cat > /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf << EOF
  # Config file for sSMTP sendmail
  root=postmaster
  mailhub=smtp.cox.net
  hostname=$(hostname -f)
  FromLineOverride=yes
  EOF
  

• hostname: Nothing special here, besides you probably noticed I was lazy and let the computer tell what is its own name. If you do not get the FQDN, you probably need to check your configuration somewhere.

But, what if you need to autenticate to send an email (SMTP Auth)? Well, ssmtp allows some form of authentication. No kerberos or key pairs though, just plain old username and password. If you needed that, you would add something like this

AuthUser=server1
AuthPass=secret_password

to your /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf file. Password will be in plaintext, so make sure only root can read this file. Note I used server1 as the username. Reason for that is I would think either each server would have its own email account or a commom server email account would be used. You decide.

When all of that is done, it is time to do some testing. First quick test would be to send an email to you (username@somedomain.com):

echo test | ssmtp -v username@somedomain.com

The -v option is verbose, so you can see what is going on and perhaps have some clues in case it all goes boink. A fancier ssmtp test (which should give you ideas on how to use it in your own scripts) would be

victim=username@somedomain.com
ssmtp $victim << EOF
From: test@$(hostname)
To: $victim
Subject: A longer test
Hi there!

EOF

Now go check if the email arrived in your mailbox and what your spam filter thought of it. Remember, the fancier example allows you to make your email a bit more proper... just sayin'!

References

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSMTP
  
  
• http://www.how2centos.com/installing-ssmtp-on-centos-5-6/
  
• http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/10/21/sending-email-from-your-system-with-ssmtp/
  
  
• http://h3manth.com/content/sendmails-sendmail-attachments