Using the PI as an headless server doing some stuff, it’s a good thing to have reports by email. The best and easy way is to run sSMTP a very simple program that sends outgoing email to a mailhub for delivery.
You can actually use your Gmail account or any other account (I’m using any other account).
Install it:
apt-get install ssmtp
Configure it at /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf. The most relevant option:
mailhub=mail.domain.com (the SMTP agent host, the “outgoing server” in email clients like thunderbird)
If your outgoing server needs authentication for relaying (probably you do need, if you can send emails to your own domain emails, but can’t send to external emails), set the credentials with these two options:
AuthUser=youruser@domain.com
AuthPass=yourpassword
To test it, i executed the good old mail command but get a no-no response:
-bash: mail: command not found
As Raspbian is Debian based, the “user-friendliness” doesn’t provide these stone age commands to protect one from oneself… so I went kind of mental and install it anyway:
apt-get install mailutils
…
After this operation, 22,8 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] yOH BOY, THAT’S A FUCKING LOTS OF MB/PACKAGES/DEPENDENCIES TO GET A CLI COMMAND
mail youremail@domain.com
in the interactive mode, just follow the instructions, write some non-sense to test it and then press CTRL-D to test it. And your email should automagically appear in youremail@domain.com inbox.
If something goes wrong, you can add DEBUG=YES to /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf.