p3mail - Send terminal outputs by mail

p3mail (Pathetic Python Pipe Mail) allows you to send terminal outputs by mail

Basically something like this

./long_running_command_printing_logs | p3mail "My mail's subject"

Since it is highly probable that you are both the sender and receiver, these latter are pre-defined in a config file (see below).

Important note Remember that only stdout is captured when using pipes. You may want to redirect stderr to stdout to also catch errors. For example

./my_command_printing_errors 2>&1 | p3mail "My mail's subject"

Note: the order of stdout and stderr outputs is not preserved :( See: https://hisham.hm/2016/11/24/fun-hack-to-redirect-stdout-and-stderr-in-order/

Install

pip install p3mail

Usage

Using config file

Copy the config_example file to $HOME/.config/p3mail/config and start using p3mail ! See the examples below.

Using command line

usage: p3mail [-h] [--to TO] [--from DEST] [--config CONFIG] subject

positional arguments:
  subject          The subject of the mail

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --to TO          The receiver's address. If not provided, it will look at
                   the config file
  --from DEST      The sender's address. If not provided, it will look at the
                   config file
  --config CONFIG  Specify a custom location for the config file

Examples

Send backup logs by mail

my_backup_program | p3mail "Backup for `hostname` on `date`"

Cronjob notification

If your cron job is ran by root p3mail will look at /home/root/.config/p3mail/config which is not something you might want. You can specify the config file location with:

echo "Hello msg body" | p3mail --config /home/alice/.config/p3mail/config "My subject"

Tip: you can put an alias in your .bashrc to avoid specifying this file everytime like this:

p3mail="p3mail --config /home/alice/.config/p3mail/config"

Motivation

I coded this application because it is always painful (at least for me) to make the built-in mail service work (or whatever it is called on Linux distributions). Here are some other reasons:

1. You don't always have the rights to configure this mail service (e.g. on a remote server)
2. sendmail, mail or other mail sender command line tools are not always installed or configured on the machines you are using
3. p3mail only requires that Python 3 is installed
4. p3mail does not requires sudo rights
5. p3mail needs a reason to live

Security concerns

You may not want to hardcode your smtp user or your smtp password in a config file. I understand that so p3mail allows you to read your credentials from environment variables.

1. In your config set as an empty value for either/both SmtpUser/SmtpPass e.g. SmtpPass =
2. Then call p3mail like this:

export SMTP_USER=alice
export SMTP_PASS=super_secr3t_passw0rd

./my_verbose_script | p3mail "Verbose script report"

TODO

• Add Gmail oauth support