Send Mail with Gmail and sSMTP

Sometimes we want to enable our servers/desktops to be able to send email without setting up a full featured mail server or configuring postfix to route through Gmail.

sSmtp is an extremely simple, resource conserving, SMTP server that will allow your desktop or server to send email. In this article we are going to use sSMTP to send outgoing email through Gmail.

Install sSMTP

Debian/Ubuntu users can Install with this command:

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

We need to then edit, ‘/etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf’:

root=username@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
rewriteDomain=
hostname=username@gmail.com
UseSTARTTLS=YES
AuthUser=username
AuthPass=password
FromLineOverride=YES

Then add each account that you want to be able to send mail from by editing, ‘/etc/ssmtp/revaliases‘:

root:username@gmail.com:smtp.gmail.com:587
localusername:username@gmail.com:smtp.gmail.com:587

Now try sending an email

You can send an email through your favorite email client, like ‘mutt’, or type:

sudo ssmtp someemail@email.com

You will then type your message, hit enter and ‘ctrl+d‘

Now that you have a simple outgoing email server setup, you can do all sorts of neat things:

• Configure cron jobs to send log reports to your email address
• Alert you of all kinds of system changes
• Send email alerts when your computer reaches a certain temperature
• Send email through PHP, Python, Ruby, and Perl