Can I send email from Jenkins using just sendmail or do I need to install some kind of SMTP gateway?

Question

I currently have Jenkins setup to send through an AWS SMTP server, but I would like to change this so that I can send emails directly on the local network.

I have sendmail installed on the server, and a terminal test proves that Sendmail can transmit emails to an external address, so I know this is working, but I can't for the life of me get Jenkins to send directly via SendMail.

The few examples I find suggest Jenkins and SendMail are all I need but if that's the case then the setup doesn't work.

Please advise.

Answer 1

Jenkins sends email via SMTP so as long as you have sendmail listening on loopback and configured to accept email it should work as long as you put localhost as the mail server

Answer 2

I run into this problem today. Here is my solution for anyone who is looking for answer of the same problem.

If you don't want to setup a smtp provider such as gmail, you can install postfix (see here about how to install postfix non-interactively) on the maschine/container on which Jenkins is running.

Make sure postfix runs well. In my case postfix did not start automatically after installation.

service postfix start

Then in Jenkins select Manage Jenkins => Configure System => Email Notification. Enter localhost In field "SMTP Server". Let Jenkins send out a test mail to test it.