Send Joblogs, Alerts, Mount Requests via Email (bsmtp)

bsmtp is a simple mail transport program that permits more flexibility than the standard mail programs typically found on Unix systems. It can even be used on Windows machines.

It is called:

Usage: bsmtp [-f from] [-h mailhost] [-s subject] [-c copy] [recipient ...]
       -c          set the Cc: field
       -dnn        set debug level to nn
       -f          set the From: field
       -h          use mailhost:port as the bsmtp server
       -l          limit the lines accepted to nn
       -s          set the Subject: field
       -?          print this message.

If the -f option is not specified, bsmtp will use your userid. If the option -h is not specified bsmtp will use the value in the environment variable bsmtpSERVER or if there is none localhost. By default port 25 is used.

If a line count limit is set with the -l option, bsmtp will not send an email with a body text exceeding that number of lines. This is especially useful for large restore job reports where the list of files restored might produce very long mails your mail-server would refuse or crash. However, be aware that you will probably suppress the job report and any error messages unless you check the log file written by the Director (see the messages resource in this manual for details).

recipients is a space separated list of email recipients.

The body of the email message is read from standard input.

An example of the use of bsmtp would be to put the following statement in the Messages resource of your bacula-dir.conf file. Note, these commands should appear on a single line each.

mailcommand = "/home/bacula/bin/bsmtp -h mail.domain.com -f \"\(Bacula\) %r\"
               -s \"Bacula: %t %e of %c %l\" %r"
operatorcommand = "/home/bacula/bin/bsmtp -h mail.domain.com -f \"\(Bacula\) %r\"
                  -s \"Bacula: Intervention needed for %j\" %r"

Where you replace /home/bacula/bin with the path to your Bacula binary directory, and you replace mail.domain.com with the fully qualified name of your bsmtp (email) server, which normally listens on port 25. For more details on the substitution characters (e.g. %r) used in the above line, please see the documentation of the Mail Command in the Messages Resource chapter of the Bacula Enterprise Main manual.

It is highly recommended that you test one or two cases by hand to make sure that the mailhost that you specified is correct and that it will accept your email requests. Since bsmtp always uses a TCP connection rather than writing in the spool file, you may find that your from address is being rejected because it does not contain a valid domain, or because your message is caught in your spam filtering rules. Generally, you should specify a fully qualified domain name in the from field, and depending on whether your bsmtp gateway is Exim or Sendmail, you may need to modify the syntax of the from part of the message. Please test.

When running bsmtp by hand, you will need to terminate the message by entering a ctl-d in column 1 of the last line.

If you are getting incorrect dates (e.g. 1970) and you are running with a non-English language setting, you might try adding a LANG=”en_US” immediately before the bsmtp call.

In general, bsmtp attempts to cleanup email addresses that you specify in the from, copy, mailhost, and recipient fields, by adding the necessary < and > characters around the address part. However, if you include a display-name (see RFC 5332), some SMTP servers such as Exchange may not accept the message if the display-name is also included in < and >. As mentioned above, you must test, and if you run into this situation, you may manually add the < and > to the Bacula mailcommand or operatorcommand and when bsmtp is formatting an address if it already contains a < or > character, it will leave the address unchanged.