Hello mailcow community,
First post here and I would like to start with a big THANK YOU 🙏 for both the devs and the community! Great product, greater documentation, greatest community!

My question is similar to mailcow community Icon this one

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Send Mail from host system for monitoring
D dennisB
Hi and thank you for that amazing project 🙂 I successfully set up my mailcow for sending and receiving mails <3 I was wondering, if there is any possibility or howto on sending emails from the host system for monitoring reasons. In fact, I would like to run e.g. Apticron to notify me on host
mailcow community
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but following Rule#5 I am creating this new topic.

What I would like to do

Send email from the host system (cron, monitoring, etc)

Why I can’t do it by following the docs

I understand that in docs.mailcow.email Icon the docs

docs.mailcow.email Icon docs.mailcow.email
Local MTA on Docker host - mailcow: dockerized documentation
None
docs.mailcow.email
it is taken for granted that Postfix is already installed on the host system. In my case, that is not true. In fact there is no MTA installed (no /usr/sbin/sendmail or anything else I recognize).

It seems like an overkill to install Postfix just to be able to follow the docs, so I am looking for alternative solutions.

What I have come up so far

I thought about using msmtp

debian.pkgs.org
https://debian.pkgs.org/12/debian-main-amd64/msmtp_1.8.23-1_amd64.deb.html
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but I would like to make sure that I will not cause any damage/malfunction. Please note that I have NOT used that before on other systems. It’s just a possible solution I have found by looking around.

My main question

What is the best course of action for me to be able to send email from the host system? I would prefer to use an external SMTP server, although it wouldn’t be unacceptable to use mailcow: dockerized

Details of the host system

It is much simpler. From what I understand you want to send mails for e.g. monitoring system via mailcow.
Just point your monitoring system that need to send mail as SMTP host with your mailcows host IP address.
Use port 25 to send mail.

In Mailcows admin interface, define the sending servers IP adadress (e.g. the monitoring system) as “forwarding host”

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Thank you @esackbauer for the reply. I mainly use cron on the host, for all sorts of tasks. That’s the reason I need to send email directly from the host system.

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