Score:0

Ubuntu

Sendmail to send system emails

Regev

10/31/23, 1:13 PM

Is there a way to send an email to my Gmail account, each time I get a system email from Ubuntu?

I'm using Ubuntu 22.10 and has Sendmail installed and working (sending emails from/to my Gmail account). When I ssh to the machine, I sometimes see a notification about having a new email waiting (from the server). I would like to receive a notification on my Gmail each time I gat such an email.

I was looking at solutions to possibly use a cron job with Sendmail to achieve this, but I don't know how to design and trigger it. I didn't find any tutorials and it seems to be beyond the scopes of my current knowledge.

Any ideas or alternative solutions will be very appreciated!

Thanks

Edit - some more info:

I've been using Linux for years and thought I knew enough about Ubuntu, but this "system-email" thing got me stuck.

So I first encountered it recently with ddclient, where there's an option to get emails on failure:

mail=root
mail-failure=root

I can read them be running mail from the terminal. This example and others like it, are email notifications from parts of the system, and I just think it would be great to have them sent or forwarded directly to my personal Gmail. I got Sendmail connected to my Gmail account, and that's where I'm stuck now.

Example - when I ssh to the server, I get this message (the last line):

Welcome to Ubuntu 22.10 (GNU/Linux 5.19.0-1006-raspi aarch64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage

2 updates can be applied immediately.
2 of these updates are standard security updates.
To see these additional updates run: apt list --upgradable

You have new mail.

245

1 + 4

server

gmail

cron

sendmail

David

10/31/23, 1:15 PM

What is in the emails from the server and who are they from?

raj

10/31/23, 1:48 PM

If sending emails from/to your Gmail account works, can't you just forward email from the account in question (that is the recipient of "emails from server") to your Gmail account? If you don't want to receive the entire message on Gmail, you can forward to a script that sends a simple notification to Gmail using sendmail.

Regev

11/2/23, 9:07 PM

That would probably work, but I can't find a way to do it

raj

11/2/23, 9:48 PM

Did you try the standard `.forward` file? You should put this file in the home directory of the user who receives mail (that is probably `root`) and put your Gmail address inside this file.

Score:0

Ubuntu

AnFi

11/1/23, 10:48 AM

Classic initial suggestion is to use procmail for processing messages incoming to user's (non root) mailbox. procmail can use vacation to limit notifications rate.

Which program your sendmail uses as its local delivery agent?

grep ^Mlocal /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

sensible-mda as local mailer means procmail if procmail is installed. In such case ~/.procmailrc works without extra tricks.

+ 2

Regev

11/2/23, 9:03 PM

That's what I get when I run the command: Mlocal, P=/usr/sbin/sensible-mda,

AnFi

11/3/23, 10:11 AM

`sensible-mda` means `procmail` **if procmail is installed**. In such case `~/.procmailrc` works without extra tricks.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Sendmail to send system emails

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