So I'm using various resources (the web, these forums, man pages, and the sendmail website) to construct a sendmail command line.

A sample email has been created for testing purposes. it consists of:
In the above, I've replaced my correct actual email address with the *'s, obviously.

The sendmail command that I have crafted (so far) is:
The above command has actually been tried. It runs without error messages and returns to the prompt.

Waiting, checking mail and poking around the hard drive eventually revealed that the email was not sent to my ISP. It was instead interred in a place on my hard drive, in var/spool/mqueue. There were two text files with garbly names. One contained the message body. The other contained headers, including extra ones added by sendmail. Inspection of the headers revealed that sendmail had no knowledge of my isp's email server name. This, in retrospect, is reasonable. After all, I had not told sendmail this information.

So, there is only one bit of data needed to get my mail-sending working: there is a place, in the place is a file. In this file needs to be added a string. This string is the name of my ISP's smtp server. I know the name of my ISP's smtp server but I can't figure out how to let sendmail in on it.

I found the location of the configuration file for sendmail. It's contents were ... obtuse.

The man page makes no mention of specifying the smtp server. Google searching has many results, none which were helpful. In a similar fashion and with similar result, these forums were searched. The sendmail web site was ... beyond me.


This indicates on of two things.

One, sendmail doesn't actually do what I think it does and I'm barking up the wrong tree. I'm using a tool created for one purpose for a completely different purpose.

Two, sendmail has an easy and obvious way of specifying the smtp server, but I've overlooked it: read it right on the man page but, because of the particular phrasing, did not recognize it for what it was.

In the case of option two, how can I achieve the desired result, that is, to send mail from a command line?

Thank you in advance.

While I found your OP refreshing in terms of both research and style I prefer the actual error text instead. All Sendmail needs is to be able to resolve external addresses and it will figure out things. If you configured sendmail (or use a sane default /etc/mail/sendmail.cf), and you know your ISP's MTA resides at "smpt.do.main" try posting the output of running "echo "/mx do.main"|/usr/sbin/sendmail -bt" (or use "/usr/sbin/sendmail -bt -d" if you can't get enough of diagnostics). BTW, you don't really need headers like date and MUA, at least I wouldn't use a Message-ID one unless you generate it on the fly.

I didn't want to focus on the negative.

Well, I thank you for your reply.

In the meantime (before I saw your reply), I found this link on the subject: http://www.screaming-penguin.com/node/4214

Following the directions, on the link, I somehow deleted the config file for sendmail. Taking this as a hint that I this program was too complicated for me, I fetched and compiled msmtp instead. Fail at one thing, try another.

Again, thank you for your reply, as it was knowledgeable and did not have the often-used "did you check google" line.