Usually when I decide to “quickly set up something on a server” it takes much longer than anticipated. Not so with sSMTP.

Basically it’s a simpler way to send emails from the the commandline. In my case with Gmail. Check out this article on how to set it up. I have also combined it with Logwatch and Fail2Ban and it worked immediately.

In the case of Fail2Ban just one extra line in the config-file was needed:

mta = ssmtp

All of this was inspired by this post (via Hacker News).