# Outgoing Mail Options?

## eddieparker

Hello:

I'm trying to set up my box to send me e-mails to my Gmail account (things like logs, intrusion attempts, etc).

I've traditionally done this by having Postfix set up to relayhost to my ISPs smarthost - but my newest ISP (Frontier) has SMTP Auth, and it seems to be causing me more pain than it's worth.

My question therefore is: is there a better way to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Cheers,

-e-

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## Bones McCracker

Not sure what you SMTP Auth problems are, but you ought to be able to use a light mail user agent (MUA) combined with a relay-only mail transfer agent (MTA).  Examples of light MUA are mailx and nail (a.k.a. 'heirloom mailx').  I use mailx.  Examples of light MTA are msmtp, nbsmtp, ssmtp, esmtp.  I use esmtp because it can also do local mail.  You should be able to google for configuration examples including those for GMail.

Some of these might be a bit dated:

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Gmail_and_sSMTP

http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/Msmtp

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## eddieparker

Thanks for the link to mtsmtp BoneKracker.  I'm not sure why I had so much problems with postfix & GMail, but smtp was a snap.

If anyone needs this as a resource, I followed this guide to set it up with gmail: http://www.absolutelytech.com/2010/07/17/howto-configure-msmtp-to-work-with-gmail-on-linux/

Maybe one day I'll try postfix again, but I'm just happy to move on to other stuff at this point.

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## Bones McCracker

 *eddieparker wrote:*   

> Thanks for the link to mtsmtp BoneKracker.  I'm not sure why I had so much problems with postfix & GMail, but smtp was a snap.
> 
> If anyone needs this as a resource, I followed this guide to set it up with gmail: http://www.absolutelytech.com/2010/07/17/howto-configure-msmtp-to-work-with-gmail-on-linux/
> 
> Maybe one day I'll try postfix again, but I'm just happy to move on to other stuff at this point.

 

If you don't actually need a mail server (for example, you're not actually providing mail accounts to a group of people), then it's much more efficient to use one of these light tools.  That way you don't have to have a daemon running all the time just to send the occasional message from the system.

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