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Sometimes, you may want to be able to send an e-mail from a shell
script or manually from the command line. For example, you may want to
periodically send out a server health e-mail. We found that when doing
this, it is a little tough to control how the sender's e-mail address
will appear. The first problem we ran into was that our domain was
appearing as something like user@localhost.local. The second problem is
that we didn't want to expose the user's name, which could be root or www. We were looking for a way to have the sender's address appear as
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(or something along those lines).
Step 1 - Install Postfix & Mailutils
In our environment, we had already installed Postfix to send outgoing mail. This can be done as follows: sudo ant-get install postfix
You
may need to step through some configurations to get it up and running.
Once installed, you then need to install additional mail tools to be
able to send email from the command line:
sudo apt-get install mailutils
Step 2 - The Easy Solution
Once installed, you can send e-mails from the command line like so:
echo Email body | mail -s "subject line" -a From:
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This will send an e-mail to
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, and will use the address of
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.
We
say this is the "easy solution" because, although it works, the
recipient would still be able to look at the mail message headers and
see the address of user@localhost.local. This simply sets the "From"
header of the email, but the sender envelope still contains the
original user's address.
Step 3 - Sender Aliases
We
took this a step further to try to fully control the sender's e-mail
address. There were two configurations we made; one to control the
sender's domain, the other to apply an alias to our user name.
First, edit your Postfix configuration file as follows:
sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf
You must either change or add the following lines, using the domain you would like to show in the sender's address:
myhostname = domain.com
smtp_generic_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/generic
Next,
you need to configure the alias file. This file maps users to the
proper external name to use. You can also have a catch-all alias.
sudo nano /etc/postfix/generic
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@domain.com
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After this file is created, you'll need to use postmap to install it, then reboot Postfix:
sudo postmap /etc/postfix/generic
sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart
After
this is all done, you can send an email without needing to specify the
From header, and it will still show as our noreply address:
echo Email body | mail -s "subject line"
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