[Cialug] best solution for sending regular email reports

[Hakan E. Duran]

Thank you Jeffrey. There are a lot of very useful information here and I
wasn't aware of most of them. I will definitely check out Mailgun and
pushover.net.

I thought ssmtp required an SMTP server, such as google's
to work and that was part of the reason why I got into this adventure. I
think that is what you are also stating too, and it doesn't eliminate
the need of using a working server. Am I missing something?


On 19/06/21 09:15, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
> 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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> > Cialug at cialug.org
> > https://www.cialug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cialug
> >
>
>
> --
> Jeff Ollie
> The majestik møøse is one of the mäni interesting furry animals in Sweden.
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