First, see this post to see how you can send an email from terminal. Once you solved this problem and you can send emails from terminal, the following method should work to setup cron job to send emails.
Edit the crontab entries using crontab -e
command (by default this will edit the current logged-in users crontab) and add the following line:
0 0 * * 1,3,5 $HOME/scripts/send_email.sh >> $HOME/tmp/out 2>&1
Now you should create send_email.sh
script. Something like this:
#!/bin/bash
recipients="[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]"
subject="...Subject..."
cat $HOME/email_message | mail -s $subject $recipients
$HOME/email_message
is the message (file) you want to send.
Don't forget to grant execute access for the script:
chmod +x $HOME/scripts/send_email.sh
echo 'test' | mail -s 'test' [email protected]
(substitute the email address for something valid) from the terminal - if it works, you might use it as a basic method for sending notifications. There's a problem with gmail not providing whitelisting though, so you can't be sure it won't be filtered by spam filters. For thecrontab
part, you might package commands into a script and call it up from crontab or simply do10 10 * * * echo 'message' | /usr/bin/mail -s 'subject' [email protected]
.