sendmail is a mail client in Linux with many vulnerabilities and tedius configuration steps, many system administrators have disabled using it. Then how do we know what happens if a crontab script executes with error?
Actually there are some replacements for sendmail, one is ssmtp, but this application is no longer maintained, we even cannot find its source code on Google. Fortunately, we can use msmtp to replace sendmail. The address : http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/
1. Installation
After downloading and decompressedm we run
./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 --sysconfdir=/etc
make
make install
2. Configuration
If you add --sysconfdir=/etc in step 1, then the global configuration file is under /etc, with name msmtprc.
Here are some configurations
$ cat /etc/msmtprc
defaults
tls off
logfile /var/log/msmtp.log
account default
host mail.tudou.com
from xxxx@tudou.com
domain tudou.com
auth login
user sunchangming
password xxxx
3. Let mail command call msmtp instead of sendmail
This is really simple, add one line in /etc/mail.rc
set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"
4. Let crontab use msmtp
Open /etc/sysconfig/crond, set value of CRONDARGS
CRONDARGS="-m '/usr/bin/msmtp -t'"
Remember to add -t, otherwise msmtp will read recipients list from command line arg instead of stdin. If not adding the -t, you may get the following error
Sep 24 18:06:01 a02 crond[8023]: (app_admin) MAIL (mailed 52 bytes of output but got status 0x0040 )
Hope this will help someone.
