I have put together a server, running Mint Maya distro, that does some simple housekeeping tasks on my home network. I would like to have it send me email notifications under certain conditions (using SMTP to my remote 1and1 email server). Since I need the email send command to be included in a shell script or a Perl script, this must be a tool that works at the command line.

However, I'm having trouble finding an email client that works. The Linux command "mail" doesn't work because there's no way to include a password. So then I installed Sendemail, but it doesn't work because there is no command line switch to choose outgoing port 587, and my ISP (Comcast), like most ISPs, blocks outgoing port 25. Moreover, there's supposed to be a way to go into a sendemail configuration file in /etc/mail to change the outgoing port, but the folder /etc/mail doesn't, for some reason, exist in my installation of Mint.

Therefore, does someone know either: (1) how to change the port to 587 in the sendemail client? or (2) what other command line email client is available that allows password authentication and use of outgoing port 587?

I have solved this problem. In particular, ssmtp is an email client that appears to work reasonably well for sending simple command line emails using a remote server.