I thought I would share this quick guide to setting up sending yesterdays logs without needing to install Sendmail or another heavy weight email client.

Step 1. Install our lightweight SMTP client.

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

Step 2. Configure our client to talk to Gmail.

sudo vim /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

The config for Gmail should look like this:

root=YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
rewriteDomain=YOUR_EMAIL_DOMAIN
AuthUser=YOUR_USERNAME
AuthPass=YOUR_PASSWORD
FromLineOverride=YES
UseTLS=YES
UseSTARTTLS=YES
  hostname=smtp.gmail.com:587

Step 3. Check your configuration works

cat - | /usr/sbin/ssmtp -v

Now press ctrl-d and you should see something like this:

[<-] 354 Go ahead l4sm46964373een.13 - gsmtp
[->] Received: by smtp.gmail.com:587 (sSMTP sendmail emulation); Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:40:08 +0100
[->] From: YOUR_SENDER_EMAIL
  [->] Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:40:08 +0100

You also should receive an email.

Step 4. Install Logwatch.

sudo apt-get install logwatch

Step 5. Check if logwatch works with ssmtp.

sudo logwatch --detail high --mailto EMAIL_TO_SEND_TO --range yesterday

You should now get an email containing yesterdays logs.

Last Step! setup a cron task to send your logs every day.

sudo crontab -e

Your task should look like this:

# m h dom mon dow command<br/>0 1 * * * logwatch --detail high --mailto EMAIL_TO_SEND_TO --range yesterday

Enjoy!

Back to the Blog