Re: How to send an email from vma?

Update: Apparently, I downloaded an old version of vMA, so this is for vMA 4. I'm working on vMA 5 right now...

I ran into this same problem. None of my VMs have network-accessable SMTP servers, so my vMA VM needs to send directly to the recipient's server, which should be fine in most cases. First I tried looking for sendmail, postfix, sendEmail and other lightweight SMTP applications, but there aren't any. They either require an SMTP relay to talk to, or require lots of RPMs, or RPMs I wasn't able to find easily. The RHEL release that vMA 5 is built upon is spectacularly old, so I had to hunt around for RPMs. I won't say this is the best solution, but it does work. This is what I did:

1. SSH into the vMA VM (I used WinSCP).

2. Get the following RPMs and transfer them over:

perl-IO-Socket-SSL-1.44-1.el5.rfx.noarch.rpm

perl-Net-SMTP-SSL-1.01-1.el5.rf.noarch.rpm

perl-Net-SSLeay-1.36-1.el5.rfx.x86_64.rpm

I got mine from "random" sites (e.g. http://pkgs.repoforge.org/perl-Net-SSLeay/)

3. Install them all via sudo rpm -i *rpm

4. Create a Perl script to send mail. This is probably my third Perl script ever written. It has no error checking, and generally shouldn't be used, but it does work under perfect conditions. I intentionally broke it, so you'll have to uncomment and modify one line for it to work:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Getopt::Std;
use Net::SMTP;

my %options = ();
getopts("d:f:s:", \%options);

my @tmp = split(/@/, $options{f});
my $destinationDomain = $tmp[1];

my @mxServers = `dig +short mx $destinationDomain | sort -n | awk '{print \$2}'`;
my $mxServer = $mxServers[0];

chomp(@mxServers);

chop(@mxServers);

my $mxServer = $mxServers[0];

#my $smtp = Net::SMTP->new($mxServer, Debug => 1) || die "Error: $!";
$smtp->mail($options{f});
$smtp->recipient($options{d});

$smtp->data;
$smtp->datasend("From: $options{f}\n");
$smtp->datasend("To: $options{d}\n");
$smtp->datasend("Subject: $options{s}\n");
$smtp->datasend("\n");

while (defined(my $line = <STDIN>)) {
    $smtp->datasend($line);
}

$smtp->dataend;
$smtp->quit;

Good luck!

Josh