up vote 4 down vote favorite

I am trying to configure ssmtp on our Ubuntu 12.04 server. However I had no luck so far. My ssmtp.conf looks like this:

root=me@server.com
mailhub=mail.server.com:25
rewriteDomain=
hostname=hostname.server.com
AuthUser=me
AuthPass=mypassword
UseTLS=YES
FromLineOverride=YES

When I try to send mails I get ssmtp: Cannot open mailhub:25. When I use sudo the error message reads a little different ssmtp: Cannot open mail.server.com:25 The server should normally accept SMTP on port 25 and I can contact it with telnet mail.server.com 25. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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How are you trying to send mail? – fkraiem Oct 2 '14 at 20:06
    
ssmtp guy@server.com < mail.txt and ssmtp guy@server.com – n1000 Oct 2 '14 at 20:22
    
Maybe try mailx guy@server.com < mail.txt. Also, anything interesting in /var/log/mail.log? – fkraiem Oct 2 '14 at 20:25
    
Mailx is not installed. Without sudo: /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf not found, Unable to locate mailhub, with sudo: SSL connection using (null) – n1000 Oct 2 '14 at 20:32
    
At least in case with my mailhub I had to use port 587 because 25 was constantly blocked. Try this one out, also see if you mail server can be accessed from another port. Also , last resort could be to switch to msmtp. That's what I have now – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Oct 2 '14 at 21:19
up vote 4 down vote

There is another case, which I encountered, where this happens: If you remove read access to ssmtp.conf from others because you don't want the password to be visible to all users, then you will get the same error unless your account has read access to that file. For example, when trying sendmail you might have to do sudo sendmail instead.

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This solved this for me. Seems like a different method could be to change the group of the ssmtp.conf file to "mail" or something, then add your user there, and chmod g+r that file. – Hut8 Jan 29 '16 at 16:44
3  
For a secure way to grant appropriate permissions, see here: wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSMTP#Security – Tyler Apr 5 '16 at 2:37
up vote 5 down vote accepted

Ok I figured it out... I had to use UseSTARTTLS=YES instead of UseTLS=YES. Also I had to enter root:me@server.com:mail.server.com:25in /etc/ssmtp/revaliases. Hope this helps others as well.

If you want to use other user accounts than root, you will have to add those to /etc/ssmtp/revaliases as well and add them to the 'mail' group.

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