Send email from a Linux shell

Most of us only send email to other people and use either a desktop client or some form of webmail. For those who are so inclined, sending an email from the command line in Linux is also relatively easy. First, you will need to install ssmtp. In Ubuntu, run this command:

sudo aptitude install ssmtp

If you are using a different distribution it may exist in your repositories already or you may have to add a new one. You will need to make some changes to the default config file. Make a backup of the original file in case you want to revert back to it:

sudo cp /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf.orig

When I set this up, I created a Gmail account so that I could keep track of the emails sent conveniently if I want. To set it up to use a Gmail account, edit the config file so that these lines are present:

root=[your address]@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
AuthUser=[your address]
AuthPass=[password]
UseSTARTTLS=YES

Now any message you send will come from [your address]@gmail.com and you can see what messages have been sent by logging into that Gmail account. This is the easiest way I have found to send a message:

echo -e "Subject: [some subject]\n\n[the body goes here]\n[second line of body]\n" | ssmtp [address to send to]

So, for example, to send a message with a subject of "This weekend" and a body of "Want to get dinner friday? Call me." to philb@mydomain.com, you would type this:

echo -e "Subject: This weekend\n\nWant to get dinner friday? Call me.\n" | ssmtp philb@mydomain.com

The -e flag on echo tells it to look for backslash escape characters. This means that everywhere there is a "\n" it will become a new line. Also, notice that there is an extra line between the subject and the body.

So why is this useful? This is useful to send yourself notifications from the system. For example, you might have a cron script that runs every so often and you want a notification whenever it finishes successfully. Another example I saw during my research was to add a line to "/root/.bashrc". That will send out a message whenever someone logs in as root to the system.

You can also have it send text messages to your phone. To do so, just send an email to the corresponding address for the service provider:

Verizon: 10digits@vtext.com
AT&T: 10digits@mobile.att.net
Sprint: 10digits@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: 10digits@tmomail.net
Cricket: 10digits@sms.mycricket.com