Send email from a shell script

Question

I have written a script which runs a simple program in the background, logs the output and emails me when the job is done. It works fine except for the fact I am not receiving the email. I have tried a yahoo mail, a gmail but I never get the email. I have been told that:

1) I can try the tee command, but I have never used this

2) Some email services won't accept email when the sender is not specified

I am using Fedora. This is the code I have for logging the results of the background program and then sending the email:

(nice -n 10 nohup ./$user_cmd >$log_stdout 2>$log_stderr </dev/null ; echo $body `date` | mutt -s "$subj" $recipient) &

If this is not clear let me know and I will post the entire script. Basically the objective is to get the email sent using the nice and nohup commands.

Answer 1

There are many reasons, why you can't receive your mail(spam, MTA not conifgured). The easiest way to achieve this - configure your MTA to work through gmail SMTP servers.

But first make sure that you have MTA installed!

Here some configuration examples for different MTAs:

Postfix http://ubuntulinux.co.in/blog/ubuntu/set-up-postfix-for-relaying-emails-via-gmail-smtp-server/

Exim http://wiki.debian.org/GmailAndExim4

Sendmail http://appgirl.net/blog/configuring-sendmail-to-relay-through-gmail-smtp/

Otherwise, if you don't want to use google, make sure:

1. MTA is installed & properly configured, so you could see you mail in mail queue ( check it with mailq command )
2. If MTA can send mail, check "returned mail" in your queue, it can be possibly be marked as spam