UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello All,

I was curious if its possible to send an email (in reverse) to a linux server from an email client (like Lotus Notes, Outlook, etc...)?

I know it's possible to send an email FROM a Linux Server TO a email address, but I tried to just 'reply' to the Linux Servers
address that sent it to me but I get a "DELIVERY FAILURE: 550 Host Unknown"? I've created quite a few scripts that use
the mail command to send notifications about certain things, like Performance Monitoring data, and stuff like that. But I was
just curious if something like this is possible?

I just figured if you could send emails then maybe you could receive them too...?

Any thoughts would be great!

Thanks in Advance,
Matt

Indeed most email servers running on UNIX and Linux aren't one-way mail servers as much as mail transport agents -- MTA, for short -- which send, receive, and pass along emails as appropriate.

You can't just send an email "to the server", though, all email uses email addresses.

You used to be able to specify manual routing for email, in fact had to, but this was in the deep dark days before DNS.

Hey Corona, thanks for the reply!

Ah ha... Ok, that makes sense.
Thanks for the info... I'll look into MTA, and play around with it a bit. Other then that it's not really a big deal. I was just curious..!


Thanks Again for the info,
Matt

On a LAN, you could use sth like user@hostname, where user exists on hostname, and hostname is resolved on the LAN, be it by hosts file, or by DNS. And, of course, an MTA must be running on hostname, listening on the mail port (smtp, 25).

Hey RudiC, thanks for the reply!

Sorry, is that "sth" (i.e. "S T H", couldn't tell)..?

For the way you describe is that through the command line?
Also, I'm not too familiar with MTA, so if I can send an email to MY work email address through the CLI and it gose through, does that infer that
MTA is in fact running on the server?

The server in question is: (*I know its a pretty old version...)
SLES 10.2 (i686)

Thanks Again,
Matt

---------- Post updated at 04:39 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:37 PM ----------

Also, I just came across this while googling around a bit, could this be what I'm looking for?

email - How do I painlessly receive mail in linux and feed it to Rails? - Stack Overflow

Thanks,
Matt

sth = something
You could use netstat to check if the MTA is listening on that node. Then just try and

Code:

mail user@hostname

and see what happens... or try

Code:

mail root@localhost

Hey RudiC, thanks for the reply!

Ok, so I ran the 1st command and successfully sent an email to my work email address.

In netstat I can see the following for smtp... I wasn't sure if that's what I was supposed to be looking for in netstat?

Code:

 netstat -at | grep -i smtp
tcp        0      0 localhost:smtp          *:*                     LISTEN

Is that what you wanted me to check for in netstat, a listening smtp port?


Thanks Again,
Matt