Telegram Sendmail

telegram-sendmail replaces /usr/sbin/sendmail on Linux hosts that do not need a full MTA. It accepts email input via the standard pipe interface used by cron, logwatch, fail2ban, and other system daemons, converts it to Telegram-compatible markup, and delivers it to a configured Telegram chat. An SMTP server mode (-bs) is also provided for applications that speak SMTP directly to the sendmail binary.

Features

• Zero data loss — every raw email is spooled to disk before any network call; if Telegram is unreachable, the original message is preserved.
• True drop-in — supports all sendmail flags system daemons use in practice (-f, -r, -s, -bs, -t, -i, -oi) and ships as a standalone binary with no runtime dependencies.
• Smart filtering — suppresses known-noisy messages via glob patterns on Subject and From headers, keeping the chat focused on notifications that matter.
• Retry-aware — exponential backoff on HTTP 429/5xx with EX_TEMPFAIL (75) signalling so MTA-aware daemons re-queue automatically.
• HTML-safe — two-pass sanitisation strips dangerous tags, converts safe markup to Telegram's HTML subset, detects attachments without forwarding binary content, and truncates long bodies at word boundaries.
• Observable — structured syslog output (LOG_MAIL facility) with --console and --debug modes for interactive diagnosis, and a --probe flag for post-deploy verification, suitable for provisioning pipelines and smoke tests.

Requirements

The standalone binary (available from GitHub Releases) has no runtime dependencies — Python is not required on the target host.

For PyPI installations, the following are required:

• Python 3.10 or later
• Runtime dependencies (installed automatically by pip):
  • html2text ≥ 2024.2.26
  • requests ≥ 2.31.0

Quick Start

Installation

# Recommended: install with pipx for automatic isolation
pipx install telegram-sendmail

# Alternative: install into the system Python
pip install telegram-sendmail

Creating a Telegram Bot

1. Open @BotFather in Telegram, send /newbot, and follow the instructions. Copy the bot token it generates.
2. Send any message to the new bot or add it to a group or channel, then visit https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/getUpdates. The chat.id field in the response provides the required chat_id.

Configuration

Create the configuration file with the two required keys:

sudo tee /etc/telegram-sendmail.ini > /dev/null << 'EOF'
[telegram]
token = 123456789:AAxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
chat_id = -1001234567890
EOF

sudo chmod 600 /etc/telegram-sendmail.ini
sudo chown root:root /etc/telegram-sendmail.ini

The per-user path ~/.telegram-sendmail.ini is also supported and takes precedence over the system-wide file when both are present.

Registering as the System sendmail

TGSM_BIN=$(which telegram-sendmail)
sudo ln -sf "$TGSM_BIN" /usr/sbin/sendmail

For the update-alternatives method (when an existing MTA is present), see the User Guide.

Verifying the Installation

telegram-sendmail --probe --console --debug

Exit code 0 confirms end-to-end connectivity. 78 indicates a configuration error, 75 a transient network failure, and 1 a permanent API rejection.

Full Documentation

The complete user guide — covering all installation methods, the full configuration reference, SMTP server mode, the delivery pipeline, troubleshooting, and security hardening — is available in the GitHub repository.