mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

barbaros · 2025-05-29 21:37:30

Hello,
I have a computer running archlinux and I want to attend to the event of a cron job (or an 'at' job) wanting to send its output by e-mail. That is, I want only delivery of local messages, and I am looking for a simple (minimalistic) setup.
Any suggestions ?
Thank you. Cristian

Last edited by barbaros (2025-06-05 21:07:03)

barbaros · 2025-05-30 08:55:43

Well, I guess that was a rather silly question. It is enough to install the 'at' package and it will install automatically the 'smtp-forwarder' group, right ?
In that case, which command shall I use for checking the (local) mail ?

Fixxer · 2025-05-30 09:10:27

You could use postfix to setup local mail system:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Postfix#Local_mail

Local mailboxes, located at /var/spool/mail/$USER you can check in console / terminal by 'mail' command, from s-nail package.You can also use email client supporting /var/spool/mail boxes (eg. not ThunderSnork)

Good luck!

Last edited by Fixxer (2025-05-30 09:12:48)

cryptearth · 2025-05-30 10:50:32

even simpler than full blown postfix would be simple sendmail which takes the mail drop from cron and does a local delivery as mbox

seth · 2025-05-30 14:19:45

Is this a desktop system?
In that case I'd bend the cronjob to use notify-send/dunstify for your user unless you intend to frequently check the local mail spooler.

barbaros · 2025-05-31 07:41:16

seth wrote:

Is this a desktop system?
In that case I'd bend the cronjob to use notify-send/dunstify for your user unless you intend to frequently check the local mail spooler.

Yes it's a desktop, several actually : https://webpages.ciencias.ulisboa.pt/~c … onfig.html

My intention is to redirect the standard output and standard error so that no e-mail should be ever sent. But I want to be covered "just in case".

Last edited by barbaros (2025-05-31 07:49:36)

barbaros · 2025-05-31 07:47:22

cryptearth wrote:

even simpler than full blown postfix would be simple sendmail which takes the mail drop from cron and does a local delivery as mbox

I see the 'at' package depends on the 'smtp-forwarder' group which contains both 'postfix' and 'dma'. 'dma' provides the command 'sendmail'. I'm confused.

cryptearth · 2025-05-31 09:37:26

barbaros wrote:

cryptearth wrote:
even simpler than full blown postfix would be simple sendmail which takes the mail drop from cron and does a local delivery as mbox
I see the 'at' package depends on the 'smtp-forwarder' group which contains both 'postfix' and 'dma'. 'dma' provides the command 'sendmail'. I'm confused.

the sendmail binary is often expected no matter which mailer you use hence postfix and exim usually both supply a drop-in replacement - I guess that's just the way how arch resolves it
I use opensuse on my servers and for a long time sendmail was a hard requirement of the base meta group package (seem to got removed not long ago) and hence you coulnd't install even the most basic system without any sendmail provider
IIRC years ago there was a hard dependency of either apache or php on sendmail so whenever you tried to setup a LAMP stack sendmail was pretty much part of it

seth · 2025-05-31 09:42:41

There're also drop-ins like femtomail and I'm pretty sure I've some bash script that just cat's into your mbox, posing as sendmail, for this purpose.
I'll try to find it later this day and if I do, post it (after a review, it's probably 20 years old and embarrassing)

seth · 2025-05-31 21:05:16

Nope, was a simplistic script "local_mail $SUBJECT $BODY $USER", not even handling stdin, let alone any sendmail parameters.
I'll leave it here, yell if you need to turn this into more of a simple sendmail drop-in.

#!/bin/bash

SENDER="$(whoami)"
RECEIVER="${3:-$SENDER}"

echo "From ${SENDER} $(LC_ALL=C date +%c)
From: ${SENDER}
Date: $(date -R)
To: ${RECEIVER}
Subject: $1
User-Agent: local_mail script
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

$2

" >> /var/spool/mail/${RECEIVER}

barbaros · 2025-06-05 21:06:00

I installed 'at', 'dma' and 's-nail'.
Practically no configuration needed.
Thank you all

Arch Linux

#1 2025-05-29 21:37:30

mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#2 2025-05-30 08:55:43

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#3 2025-05-30 09:10:27

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#4 2025-05-30 10:50:32

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#5 2025-05-30 14:19:45

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#6 2025-05-31 07:41:16

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#7 2025-05-31 07:47:22

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#8 2025-05-31 09:37:26

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#9 2025-05-31 09:42:41

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#10 2025-05-31 21:05:16

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

#11 2025-06-05 21:06:00

Re: mail, local delivery only [SOLVED]

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