[Cialug] best solution for sending regular email reports

[Jeffrey Ollie]

Setting up your own mail server isn't impossible, but it isn't easy either
and does take some maintenance on an ongoing basis. If your main concern is
privacy, I'd follow Todd's suggestion and encrypt the outgoing mail and
send it through GMail so that Google can't read it. If you'd like a little
bit more control, I'd look at getting an account at Mailgun. You'll need a
domain name but those can pretty cheap (depending on the TLD) but if you
send less than 10,000 emails a month Mailgun is free.

Also, I'd eliminate postfix, exim, or sendmail on all of your servers and
just use ssmtp. ssmtp is a tiny "stub" SMTP server that will only forward
emails to a configured server. It won't do any queuing or accept emails on
port 25 so you eliminate a lot of security concerns.

You could also eliminate SMTP from the equation altogether and use a
different notification system. The possibilities here are endless but some
options might be a private Slack channel, pushover.net, one of the many
open source Slack clones (Rocket.Chat is pretty nifty), or maybe groupware
like NextCloud. I personally get a lot of use out of pushover.net and its
costs are very minimal and it has a very easy to use HTTP API, which is
very easy to use from a Python script.


On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 2:02 PM Eyüp Hakan Duran <ehakanduran at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
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-- 
Jeff Ollie
The majestik møøse is one of the mäni interesting furry animals in Sweden.