I'm following the great Config Tutorial while setting up my new server.  I was hoping to set up email alerts and have followed the instructions precisely (or I believe I have) but still receive errors when trying to send.  I get a segmentation error and this appears in the syslog:

kernel: ssmtp[12426]: segfault at 0 ip b768de43 sp bfb2a01c error 4 in libc-2.7.so[b761c000+145000]

I've retyped the test line (echo -e "Subject: a test\n\nThis is the email body." | ssmtp -d root) several times but have get the segmentation error each attempt.

ssmtp's input handling looks a little fragile. Do you have any "shell significant" characters in your Mail ID or password? e.g. !@#$%^& etc.

 

Can you show us a sterilized version of what you used for ssmtp's Configuration Variables page?

Here's the variables:

Forward "root" email to: [email protected]
E-Mail Server: smtp.gmail.com:587
Use TLS?(YES/NO): YES
Mail ID: [email protected]
Mail Password: password
Mail Domain: [email protected]
From Line Override (YES/NO): YES
Re-Write Domain:
RevAliases :

 

EDIT - Since we're concerned about special characters, there are a couple in my Gmail password to make it stronger.

Here's the variables:

Forward "root" email to: [email protected]
E-Mail Server: smtp.gmail.com:587
Use TLS?(YES/NO): YES
Mail ID: [email protected]
Mail Password: password
Mail Domain: [email protected]
From Line Override (YES/NO): YES
Re-Write Domain:
RevAliases :

 

EDIT - Since we're concerned about special characters, there are a couple in my Gmail password to make it stronger.

Spaces in the password will do it too.

 

Joe L.

Spaces in the password will do it too.

 

Joe L.

Nope, no spaces, just a couple special characters.

ssmtp uses printf and kin. Lots of format strings there, which may explain the lively behavior with things not [a-zA-Z0-9].

 

Considering this user password is cleartext in the conf file you should probably set up a non-critical account for ssmtp's use.

 

The ssmtp package page should probably warn about both.

ssmtp uses printf and kin. Lots of format strings there, which may explain the lively behavior with things not [a-zA-Z0-9].

 

Considering this user password is cleartext in the conf file you should probably set up a non-critical account for ssmtp's use.

 

The ssmtp package page should probably warn about both.

This is exactly correct.  I changed the user account and password to something much simpler and it worked perfectly.  Thanks very much for your assistance!