Mailx

Using mailx to send outgoing email directly to a smarthost

Sometimes you don't have an email system on your RT-server. In this case you can use mailx as a sendmail drop-in to directly connect to a remote mailserver (smarthost) instead of to a local installation.

First obtain mailx (previously called nail) from

http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html

Use something like the following to compile and install:

make PREFIX=/opt/mailx SYSCONFDIR=/opt/mailx/etc MANDIR=/opt/mailx/man UCBINSTALL=/usr/bin/install
make install PREFIX=/opt/mailx SYSCONFDIR=/opt/mailx/etc MANDIR=/opt/mailx/man UCBINSTALL=/usr/bin/install

Lay down a wrapper script, for instance in /opt/mailx/bin/mailx-wrapper

#!/bin/bash
 # do not query a resource file
 export MAILRC=/dev/null
 # send email directly to a remote smtp smarthost
 export smtp=smtp-smarthost.example.com
 # make mailx accept 8-bit content - in this case for German umlauts etc.
 export LC_CTYPE=de_DE.iso88591
 # send the email (since this is the first real command executed in the script, it will receive the email content from STDIN)
 /opt/mailx/bin/mailx -n -t
 # log a line to syslog for debugging purposes
 /usr/bin/logger -t RTmailer -p syslog.info -- CALL /opt/mailx/bin/mailx -n -t "$@" RETURNED $?
 

Set the following options in RT_Config.pm

Set($MailCommand , 'sendmailpipe');
Set($SendmailArguments , "");
Set($SendmailPath , "/opt/mailx/bin/mailx_wrapper");

Make sure your smarthost accepts email from the reply- and comment-addresses defined for each queue.

--- Back to the Documentation page