SendXMPP mail forward on Debian Jessie

April 9th, 2016

To have a more comfortable way of receiving messages by my servers, I wanted all my root E-Mails to be forwarded to my mobile via XMPP. I only have a limited exim4 on my machine running, configured for local mail delivery only.

So what is the solution

First install sendxmpp with apt-get install sendxmpp, then create the config file as /etc/sendxmpp.conf and insert XMPP credentials:

<sender>@<sender_server>:<port> <password>

Set the right permissions chmod 600 /etc/sendxmpp.conf and owner chown Debian-exim:Debian-exim /etc/sendxmpp.conf

Then create a script to call sendxmpp /usr/sbin/mail2xmpp. It might be that you could put this completely into the alias, however I decided to use the script. Exchange your receiving ID. -t enables the TLS connection for sending the message.

#!/bin/bash
echo "$(cat)" | sendxmpp -t -f /etc/sendxmpp.conf <receiver>@<receiving_server>

Make the script executable chmod 755 /usr/sbin/mail2xmpp and create the alias for the user, which E-Mails you want to forward in /etc/aliases:

# /etc/aliases
root:,|/usr/local/bin/mail2xmpp

To activate pipe forwarding we have to create /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros SoWhatIsTheSolution

SYSTEM_ALIASES_PIPE_TRANSPORT = address_pipe

After that run newaliases and service exim4 restart for config to take effect. Now you should be able to test if it works, by simply sending a local test E-Mail to user root.

Christian

Author