Programming

Hey guys, i am creating a tool that'll run a couple network test, generate a report then email the report. Now i a bit stuck with the email sending part... I tried at first a script which worked on some machines but then it'll work fine on some machine and act up on others... I can't really rely too much on MTA as they will be random machines and I have no ways to know what MTA is installed or even if they are configured.

Im not deep enough in C to program my own mail sending software that I could included in my program, I've checked a couple open source mail delivery agent out there but as i said i'm not deep enough in C yet to remaster only the "mail sending" sections of the codes

Any ideas or something that couple point me in the right direction??? I need something that will have very minimal dependencies on the machine's software because it'll be random customers that'll run the test... Telnet script seemed an easy option but its acting up alot.

Thanks in advance,

Jess

Can we assume that mail is configured on the customer's machine?

Are they all Linux/Unix with mail configured? If so, they should be running sendmail or something that has the same name and will accept minimal commands. If that's true, you can pipe your mail to "sendmail recipient@somewhere"

If not, the problem is that you don't know what SMTP server to use. One way to get around that is to use a program like CleanCode Email (see CleanCode Email ) and tell it to AUTH to a server you can send through. You can do the same sort of thing in Perl using the Mail::Sendmail module.

Unfortunately, you can run into trouble there because outbound firewall rules may not let you talk to that server.

If you aren't in control of the platform, I think you have to rely on a combination of methods, having your program try sendmail, try the known server, try just using plain old "mail" or "mutt" and go on to the next if it fails. Once again, though, it's hard to know that it failed because a misconfigured system can happily accept mail and never deliver it. For that reason, I'd try to my known SMTP server first (because you CAN programmatically know if that fails).

Obviously if the mail is going to you, you don't need to auth - just connect and send.


Oh, and you mentioned a telnet script? Try wrapping telnet in "expect" for better results.

Thanks Tony, sadly no I can't afford assuming sendmail/mutt or anything is pre-configured already... Alot of these customers are using our web-interface based email client therefor most aren't technically inclined enough to configured it themselves. Thats why I thought the script was a good solution until it acts up. However thanks for the great info I will look into this and let you know.

Best regards,

Jess