Postfix and Gmail Forwarding

Postfix and Gmail Forwarding#

You may be familiar with the local mail spool on your Linux system. Often error messages from failed cron jobs are sent there. However this isn’t much use if the server goes down or loses network connectivity. It would be nice to have it send those emails out to an external email inbox instead. That way you can be notified when disks fail in a RAID array or when applications/services fail or produce errors.

We’ll be setting up email forwarding for the root mail spool. Most ISPs block SMTP port 25 for anti-spam and other reasons so we’ll need an SMTP server we can authenticate to. You can have two choices here:

  • Obtain the SMTP server and port from your ISP and use your account’s credentials.

  • Use a dedicated Google Apps/G Suite/Gmail account.

This guide will use the Gmail route since I plan on using it for my home Fedora server and for my cellular Raspberry Pi. Using non-ISP credentials allows you to use the same SMTP account on different WiFi networks as well. However these instructions should work for ISP and any other SMTP provider.

Tip

I highly recommend using a dedicated email account for this. It’s not a good idea to put your main email credentials in plain-text in any file even if it’s protected by file permissions. If a system gets remotely or physically compromised you don’t want someone having access to your main email account.

The steps outlined in this guide have been tested on the following operating systems but should work for basically any Linux distro:

  • Fedora Server 25 (Fedora-Server-dvd-x86_64-25-1.3.iso)

  • Debian Jessie (2016-11-25-raspbian-jessie-lite.img)

Install Postfix#

First we must install software to forward mail and handle authenticating to the external SMTP server. There are several MTAs (message transfer agents) available but I’ll be using Postfix. Let’s install it:

Note

On Debian the postfix install script will prompt you for some info. Select Internet Site as the general type of configuration and use either gmail.com or your G Suite domain name for the system mail name.

# On Fedora:
sudo dnf install postfix cyrus-sasl{,-plain}
# On Debian:
sudo apt-get install postfix libsasl2-modules

Configuration#

Next we’ll need to configure the SASL file. This is used by Postfix to authenticate to Google’s strict SMTP requirements.

Warning

If you’re using Gmail/G Suite, you’ll need to log into your account’s “Sign-in & Security” section, scroll to the bottom, and enable “Allow less secure apps” so Google will allow Postfix to authenticate. More information: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255?hl=en

First touch and lock down the sasl_passwd file since this will hold your Gmail password in plain-text. Then populate it with either opening it with a text editor or having tee do it for you.

sudo touch /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd; sudo chmod 600 $_
sudo tee /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd <<< '[smtp.gmail.com]:587 [email protected]:PASSWORD'

Next open /etc/postfix/main.cf and configure it with:

Note

On Debian myorigin will point to /etc/mailname. Verify the contents of that file is gmail.com (or your G Suite domain).

myorigin = gmail.com
mydestination = gmail.com, $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost
relayhost = [smtp.gmail.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_tls_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_tls_security_level = encrypt

Finally re-build configs and start/restart postfix:

sudo postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
sudo systemctl restart postfix.service
sudo systemctl enable postfix

Everything should work now. Test it out with:

# On Fedora:
sudo dnf install mailx
# On Debian:
sudo apt-get install bsd-mailx

mail -s "Test Email $(date)" [email protected] <<< "This is a test email."

Forward Root Email#

Now that we’ve got Postfix successfully sending out email we need to configure the system to forward all of root’s mail to your email address. Things like failed root cronjobs and other system-related mails will be forwarded to you.

First update /etc/aliases with the following at the bottom:

root:   RECIPIENT@gmail.com

Then run newaliases to apply changes and run the mail command to test.

sudo newaliases
mail -s "Test Email for Root $(date)" root <<< "This is a test email."

Within a couple of minutes you should have received an email.

Raspberry Pi on Project Fi   Desk Photos 2017

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