Mail on the command line. This was once a thing that was used much more often. When I was in college in the 1990’s it was one of the easiest ways to get mail when on campus and off. It was taught to technical and non-technical people alike as part of orientation and you were given written instructions right at registration time. Instructions came along with the email account that they made up for you using a student id number followed by @binghamton.edu. In fact, finally in the last year I was there they got rid of this cumbersome email and started allowing users to have email with their real names.
Getting to mail back then from the command line involved logging into your Unix account from one of the many terminals spread throughout the campus. Or using the insecure but, OK at the time rlogin, remotely via dialup. Then you could either use mail or pine which was a bit more sophisticated as it was based off the pico editor, of which the popular nano editor is a derivative. It at least has somewhat of an interface that accepts up and down arrow movement and displays the shortcuts on the bottom. The standard mail program is a bit like vi, spartan but still useful.
Having access to mail locally on the command line is useful when you might be running CRON tasks or any other automated scripts that call other code as it allows you to get notified of when they have run and most importantly if they have had errors.
The other alternative is to set up ssmtp and have mail sent out of the local machine using SMTP from another established account. Of course you can also set up a full blown mail server but, that can be overkill if you are just monitoring what is happening on a few machines that you regularly log in to.
Setting up Local Mail
Below is a great Github post on how to set up local mail on a Linux Machine. I followed it and added a variation to get local mail running using the command line mail program.
It works great. I really liked the instructions, very easy to set up. I was glad I found this as, I thought it might be tricky and with these instructions it was a few minutes on each machine.
Setup a Local Only SMTP Email Server (Linux, Unix, Mac)
My Additions
Server
For use with mail the program, it might not be necessary to have a local host.com in the host file. I have not tested this.
I followed the tutorial up to and including the step of restarting postfix.
Then I installed mail instead of Thunderbird.
On the server, which only has a CLI, I wound up using mail instead of T-bird, installed via sudo apt-get install mailutils
It can be tested by sending a message to yourself by using…
mail -s “test” (your user name)@localhost
Hit enter when in the screen to bypass CC , type something and end by using Ctrl D.
Then enter the command
…and you should see the email. Hit enter at the? prompt and the message is presented.
Enter q to quit.
Another test message can be sent to test if a message to any address gets sent to you. As long as the domain is local host it will work and catch it. Other domains will fall and send you an email from the system reporting the email as undeliverable.
It works great to get the CRON messages on the machine.
Just type mail and you get a CLI email list. mail basics are, q to quit, m to compose, enter and spacebar to move through messages. Entering question mark ?, brings up command help.
Desktop Install
One gotcha that caught me is that I already had T-bird installed and therefore it had a default SMTP server already. For me this required what I would call step 6A to add a local STMP server.
6A. In the pane above “Account Actions” scroll, using the bar to the bottom “Outgoing Server (SMTP)”.
Click Add
For description I wrote Local SMTP
Server Name: localhost
Port: 25
Username : (the user name)@localhost
Authentication Method: Password, transmitted insecurely
Connection Security: None
Then I went back into the account settings for the mail set up in step 6 and set the Outgoing Server (SMTP) to the Local SMTP
Host File Aliases
Also in /etc/hosts you can put in localhost.com as a alias and it works fine, like this…
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.com
This is the way to put in aliases in a host file, for example you can have the machine name and then a shortcut to it if you have it set to a static IP. This way you can just type server to SSH to it and use that as a short name wherever you want to in scripts and etc.
192.168.1.10 Dell-Optiplex-620 server
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.com