01 February 2017 (age 26) Web

Send email from your Ubuntu LAMP server (the easy way)

The humble PHP mail() function is a handy friend to have. Whether sending yourself debugging messages from a test server, or implementing a quick-and-dirty contact form, I’ve always been able to rely on sending quick email messages from the server.

At least, this is the normal experience on a shared LAMP server. Email gets sent, more or less like magic, and I don’t have to worry too much about the fine details behind the scenes. But now that I’ve upgraded to my own VPS, things can get a little hairy in email-land.

Don’t host your own mail server

Email may be prehistoric technology that predates even the internet, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple to implement. The last thing you want is to manage a full-blown email server. Trust me, leave that to the pros.

Still, you want your PHP scripts to be able to send one-way messages. So you need to hook your server up to an existing SMTP mail service. I’ll be using Postmark to handle that for me. They’re good people — they’ll make sure your emails don’t get marked as spam and all that good stuff.

Uninstall sendmail and postfix packages

My VPS is running Ubuntu 16.04 and Apache 2.4. The most common email packages out there are sendmail and postfix. But we’re not going to use either of them, because we don’t need a complete email server that receives messages and has mailboxes and everything. All we want to do is send messages.

Let’s stop those services from running and uninstall them, then:

$ service sendmail stop
$ service postfix stop
$ apt-get remove sendmail
$ apt-get remove postfix

Install and configure Simple SMTP (sSMTP)

Simple SMTP (sSMTP) is a package that does just what it says on the tin. Let’s install it.

$ apt-get install ssmtp

Next, edit the sSMTP configuration file.

$ nano /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

I needed the following SMTP details to configure my server:

Here’s what my ssmtp.conf file looks like (I’ve set sam@samnabi.com as my sender signature in Postmark):

root=sam@samnabi.com
mailhub=smtp.postmarkapp.com:25
AuthUser=MY-POSTMARK-SERVER-API-TOKEN
AuthPass=MY-POSTMARK-SERVER-API-TOKEN
hostname=samnabi.com

If you see any lines that say rewriteDomain or FromLineOverride, you can comment those out.

Next up, let’s edit sSMTP’s list of aliases:

$ nano /etc/ssmtp/revaliases

This file lists which apache users are allowed to send mail through sSMTP. My PHP applications are run under the www-data user, so I want to enable that user, plus root:

root:sam@samnabi.com:smtp.postmarkapp.com:25
www-data:sam@samnabi.com:smtp.postmarkapp.com:25

Good to go!

Go ahead and reboot that server, your PHP mail() functions should be working now!

If you need to debug anything, check your Apache logs at /var/log/mail.log and /var/log/mail.err.

I wrote this blog post because everything else I found on the internet ended up in a dark spiral of cryptic forum posts and listserv archives. If anything’s unclear here, leave a comment! I’ll do my best to clear up any confusing parts of the process.

Sam Nabi

Comments

Howard Nathan 20 November 2017, 17:53

Hello Sam- I really appreciate the tutorial on setting up email on my server. I have followed along and am close to finishing. I just noticed that your tutorial does not display completely. Any chance you have the complete instructions somewhere??
Thanks.
Howard

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