[Cialug] best solution for sending regular email reports

[Eyüp Hakan Duran]

Dear all,

I just wanted to ask your opinion about what the best solution would be for
my question below:

I have a server at home with a daily cron job for a short SMART test. I am
not sure how helpful this will prove to be in the long run, but the idea is
to detect hard drive failures before the total catastrophe scenario.
Another cron job runs a script to search the smart test report for the
keyword "failure" and sends an email to my personal account (protonmail)
stating either there was no problem found or impending hard drive failure.
This is a python 3 script that uses gmail smtp to send this email. Overall
this system works well and is consistent.

I recently questioned myself to take gmail smtp out of this equation and
use something else instead. I installed postfix on a VM and created a bash
script that uses sendmail from that VM (via ssh) to send the email instead.
I made it work after some struggle, but in its current state, this email
goes directly to Spam in protonmail, probably due to the lack of SPF, DKIM,
DMARC set up on the VM's side. Had these been trivial to do, trust me I
would have already done them but they are not. At least not for me, I also
don't want to install dovekot, apache. php etc. which were all recommended
in some place or another as recommended software when one sets up a mail
server. To clarify, my objective is something that I can use to *send*
email to my own personal account only from my server, and nothing else. I
tried whitelisting the "from" email address in my protonmail account to
prevent those emails ending up in Spam, but that was not enough to correct
the problem. The possible solutions I can see so far are the following:
1. ignore the fact that emails go to Spam, enjoy using sendmail and don't
worry
2. complete the postfix set up with SSL certificate, mx domain, SPF, DMARC
and DKIM stuff and be the most perfectionist with a lot of bragging rights
but also with the possibility of losing some sanity in the process
3. go back to gmail and surrender your privacy, which is admittedly
non-significant in this case

Your input will be greatly appreciated.Thanks for reading!

Hakan Duran