sending email from Cygwin

[luke dot kendall at cisra dot canon dot com dot au]

On  1 Feb, Brian Dessent wrote:
>  If you're just after 'sendmail compatibility' then both ssmtp and exim 
>  provide symbolic links to /usr/sbin/sendmail.  So any script or other 
>  type of app that wants to just send out email by invoking the sendmail 
>  command should work fine. 

I appear to have both exim and ssmtp installed; but I see that
/usr/sbin/sendmail is a symlink to /usr/bin/ssmtp.  Fair enough, if
interesting.

I also see that my /etc/ssmtp directory is completely empty.  Someone
on the list mentioned /usr/local/exim/README.Cygwin, but there is no
/usr/local/exim directory on my machine.

What I was trying to do was simply to send mail into our local Unix mail
system from a shell script in Cygwin.

When I tried using exim like this:

    exim -oi luke < /tmp/sample

I got this error:

set{u,g}id failed: 22
2004-07-14 10:48:44 unable to set gid=544 or uid=18 (euid=11021): privilege not needed

(Which I assume means the opposite: that some privilege *is* needed.)

When I tried using the ssmtp sendmail I got this error:

sendmail: Cannot open mailhub:25

which I assumed was because there was no ssmtp.conf file.

Is there a problem with Cygwin's install of ssmtp, in that it creates
no config?  Or is configuration simply expected to be done locally or
manually?  (From the man page, I see that there's supposed to be an
ssmtp.conf and a revaliases files, but not what they should contain).

BTW, I note that the man page for ssmtp mentions /usr/lib/sendmail,
which doesn't exist under Cygwin: /usr/sbin/sendmail does (good!).

I adapted Uwe Mayer's mail of Oct 6th last year, to produce an
ssmtp.conf file for our site:

    root=admin
    mailhub=smtp
    rewriteDomain=cisra.canon.com.au
    FromLineOverride=YES

The happy news to report is that following this, my simple mail
delivery test worked.  I don't know what the /etc/ssmtp/revaliases file
is for, or what it should contain, but I thought I'd report these
problems and results in case they're of interest.

luke


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