When no MTA is installed, How to send an email with a cronjob?

874 views

When no MTA is installed, How to send an email with a cronjob? I have below entry in my cronjob? My /etc/cron.d/backup file looks like this.

MAILTO=myemail@example.com
15 11 * * * root /root/scripts/backup.sh

Can I send this email via SMTP server?

posted Jul 21, 2013 by anonymous

Share this question

You don't. You would have had to gone to some effort to not have an MTA
installed, as one is installed by default. Did you remove it (or simply not configure it)? [they basically work for localhost delivery without any changes.]

commented Jul 22, 2013 by Salil Agrawal

1 Answer

If you decide a full blown MTA is too heavy weight in your environment on the different nodes (Postfix isn't the ideal choice for a so called null client), then have a look at ssmtp for example. It is provided by EPEL

http://pkgs.org/centos-6-rhel-6/epel-x86_64/ssmtp-2.61-19.el6.x86_64.rpm.html

It does exactly what you intend to do. There is another null client called msmtp

http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/

but that one isn't available being packaged for CentOS.