Sendmail

Setting up (send-)mail nowadays is just a pain in the b#tt.

After having used Gmail for too long, one tend to forget. All I need is to be able to send mail from scripts so that the cron jobs managing the backups are able to e-mail me the results and reminders when copy to DVD-backups are needed.

Anyway, after a days frustration with postfix & mailto for smtp.gmail.com I gave up and installed nullmailer instead (http://untroubled.org/nullmailer/). I'm now relying through my ISP (Glocalnet): God damn their bones. Nullmailer is a sweet little utility, even though it doesn't do much more than can be done with a simple telnet session to the smtp server.

It doesn't work with gmail though, apparently the new authorisation mechanism is too much for it to handle. At least it's honest about it, postfix is just not giving you much hints about what it can and can't do (and what's screwed up). Here's a few links to some seriously misleading articles:

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/6456
http://www.howtoforge.com/postfix_relaying_through_another_mailserver
http://www.marksanborn.net/linux/send-mail-postfix-through-gmails-smtp-on-a-ubuntu-lts-server/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/postfix-relay-thru-gmail-316352/

IT guys are just perverts...