Usually, the choice of MTAs are among Exim, Courier, or Postfix. They are overly bloated for simple use! A simple requirement of sending out an email with no extra features like daemon mode, complex aliasing, queueing, database, LDAP, etc.

sSMTP, the simplest of all MTAs. Allows me to do the most important yet simplest thing, to deliver an email to a known destination by forwarding through an SMTP server. It’s not a mailserver per se, but it effectively does what any admin simply needs without all the bloated-ness.

Currently, it’s running on both our TWiki and WordPress setups using Gmail’s service!

sSMTP Configuration

On Debian, it’s easily installed by apt-get install ssmtp. Then we need to modify /etc/ssmtp/revaliases to create a simple alias for the user account.

root:user@domain.tld:smtp.gmail.com:587

The fun begins when we modify /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf. The important parts are as follow…

root=user@domain.tld
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
hostname=smtp.gmail.com:587
rewriteDomain=
UseTLS=YES
UseSTARTTLS=YES
AuthUser=user@domain.tld
AuthPass=password_here

That’s it! Nothing more nothing less! Pretty easy isn’t it???

TWiki Configuration

On TWiki, just ensure the default values are true. You can check from http://domain.tld/bin/configure

{MailProgram} = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -oi -oeq
{SMTP}{MAILHOST} =

Or, if you’re familiar with /path/to/twiki/lib/LocalSite.cfg

$TWiki::cfg{MailProgram} = '/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -oi -oeq';
$TWiki::cfg{SMTP}{MAILHOST} = '';

Nice any easy!

WordPress

Am not 100% sure if this is the right way, but it worked for me! You’d need to modify wp-includes/class-phpmailer.php…

var $From = "user@domain.tld";
var $Sender = "user@domain.tld";
var $Mailer = "sendmail";
var $Sendmail = "/usr/sbin/sendmail";

Surely, nothing beats this simplistic SMTP forwarding setup!