From sendmail to mutt

I’ve experienced one-too-many sendmail failures over the years, usually for no apparent reason. Maybe this happens after a server reboot, who knows? Rather than spending hours/days trying to figure this out (as I have done before, many times) I’ve finally had enough and given up.

It all began with my e-mail reminder script. It has been chugging along very nicely since November when I installed it on my home server, and it has never missed a single day. I had to reboot the box this past weekend and then today, I suddenly clocked-on to the fact that I’ve not been receiving any e-mails since the weekend. The service is in a ‘stopped’ state even though it was set to start at every reboot. OK then…let’s start the service. Oh? Still nothing? No e-mails sending? I just give up.

I’ve seen this so many times before, when this script was on my VPS and on my shared host. Perhaps sendmail becomes stale and dies? Whatever, goodbye sendmail.

I opted to try mutt this time around. As mutt is a client and therefore not a background daemon, it eliminates the risk of these silent service failures. We trigger the script which calls mutt, then once the email has been sent, mutt can go back to sleep or whatever it does when it’s not in use, until it is triggered again.

Sounds good to me.

Re-written and running. I’ll do another blog post on this when mutt fails. 😉️