cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/10863052
Noob question incoming, thanks in advance for any help with this!
I have a specific use case in which I want to send an automated email or text to myself once a day (the message is different each time–otherwise I would just set an alarm, lol!). I’m running Pop_OS on an old desktop computer. Where I’m stuck is getting an email to successfully send from the command line. I’m looking for easy-to-follow instructions that would help me do that, and none of the articles or videos I’ve come across thus far have helped.
I’m aware of Twilio and other services that send SMS messages, but I’m looking for something free. Especially since I only need to text one person (myself), and infrequently at that.
Below is my attempt to send an email with the telnet command. Nothing ever came through…
XXXXXXXX@pop-os:~$ telnet localhost smtp Trying ::1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. 220 pop-os ESMTP Exim 4.95 Ubuntu Sun, 07 Jan 2024 15:12:28 -0500 HELO gmail.com 250 pop-os Hello localhost [::1] mail from: XXXXXXXX@gmail.com 250 OK rcpt to: XXXXXXXX@gmail.com 250 Accepted data 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself Subject: Test Body: Is this working? . 250 OK id=1rMZW4-0002dj-Uy quit
You did. The only reason it didn’t work is because you sent the email to your own computer but targetting a Gmail account. At best Exim relayed it to Gmail which promptly discarded it because you basically tried to spoof the mail as coming from Gmail. It failed every possible email security/validity checks: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, you failed all 3.
Your best bet to send an email with a shell script and telnet is to connect to Gmail’s submission on port 587, authenticate then send the mail. Since it came in proper this time around, it’ll be delivered correctly.
Or you can configure your exim server to do that properly for you so that you can just use sendmail from your script and let Exim deal with all the authentication and delivery.