Linode.com Forum

[marv]

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for a very simple sendmail that only needs to support sending emails locally. It doesn't have to be a full features MTA. The only thing I'll use it for is for PHP to be able to send emails.

Anyone know if something like that exists?

[anderiv]

Sure - give ssmtp a try. It should be in your distro's package repository.

-erik

[SteveG]

Umm, depends on the definition of "sending emails locally". If you mean "sending local e-mails to a remote server, no local delivery", the ssmtp could work. If you mean "only local delivery of locally generated mail", then ssmtp won't work. In my brief and no doubt incomplete search a few months ago, all the "simple" MTA's were oriented towards delivering to a remote server, no local delivery.

If you're running Debian or Ubuntu, then probably the easiest solution is just to install postfix -- one of the setup options on initial install is "mailer type", with the choice "Local only" being (possibly) what you want. (It's very likely that exim has similar setup option, but postfix is what I know.)

[marv]

Thanks for the suggestions. After some research I had come across esmtp. But afterward I basically noticed what SteveG explained below. Even if I used ssmtp or esmtp, I would still have to have a remote mail server or one running locally. I wanted to avoid this, but it looks like I can't.

Between Exim and Postfix, does anyone know which tends to use less memory?

[SteveG]

I'd guess postfix, but neither of them uses enough memory to worry about. On my linode, right now, my postfix system looks to be about 12Mb resident; at least 5 of that would go away if I was local only.