Stay alert with system email warnings!
Never one to like unexpected surprises – or missing his wife’s birthday – Stuart Burns ensures his servers are bristling with email alerts.
Within Linux, lots of jobs send output to various log files and emails to users. Thing is, forwarding this important information to the appropriate users is more complicated than needed. It used to involve setting up sendmail servers and all sorts of things a user doesn’t do for fun or security. Enter SSMTP.
SSMTP (Simple SMTP)
is a lightweight and efficient command-line tool for sending emails from Unix-like systems to external email addresses without the heavy lifting of setting up your mail system. It can even redirect the output of commands to your email. No more keeping logs locally because mail isn’t configured.
This guide discusses configuring an SSMTP instance to forward system emails, monitor critical services, and dynamically customise email content, including subjects and bodies.