ZoneMinder Forums

I'm having problems getting ZM to send email successfully.

I have MSMTP properly configured and I can send email via the command line using MAIL, MSMTP and SENDMAIL.

When I attempt to send an email for an event from the filter page I get this error in the log: "Unable to send email: error closing /usr/lib/sendmail: (exit 19968)".

Jul 22 14:28:44 zoneminder zmfilter_4[1070]: INF [Creating notification email]
Jul 22 14:28:44 zoneminder zmfilter_4[1070]: INF [Sending notification email 'ZoneMinder: Alarm - Monitor-1-1 (26 - 16 18)']
Jul 22 14:28:44 zoneminder zmfilter_4[1070]: ERR [Unable to send email: error closing /usr/lib/sendmail: (exit 19968)]

Any ideas what is causing this?

Email options:
OPT_EMAIL: enabled
OPT_MESSAGE: enabled
NEW_MAIL_MODULES: enabled
SSMTP_MAIL: enabled
SSMTP_PATH: /usr/bin/msmtp
EMAIL_ADDRESS, MESSAGE_ADDRESS, FROM_EMAIL: all set to my email address

it seems that for some reason zm is using /usr/lib/sendmail instead of the configured email client. there are no entries in the msmtp log.

furthermore i write a simple perl script that simulates what zm does in zmfilter.pl and it works perfectly:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use MIME::Lite;
use Net::SMTP;
my $from_address = 'foo@bar.com';
my $to_address = 'foo@bar.com';
my $subject = 'test msg';
my $message_body = "*** body ****";
$msg = MIME::Lite->new(
From => $from_address,
To => $to_address,
Subject => $subject,
Type =>'multipart/mixed'
);
$msg->attach(Type => 'TEXT', Data => $message_body);
$msg->send('sendmail', '/usr/bin/msmtp', $from_address);

In my older ZM, sendmail is an alias to ssmtp. Is yours an alias to msmtp?
Note that ssmtp doesn't work in buster, with all email providers due to encryption issues, so I'll be using msmtp, when I upgrade.

for me sendmail is a soft link to msmtp. fyi, i'm running ubuntu server 20.04 on an intel core i7 pc.

So it is using msmtp then? You can add debugging printfs to the zm_filter.pl fairly easily (if necessary...). But first enable debugging in msmtp. Not sure how that's handled but in ssmtp you could enable debugging (Debug=YES), and then logs in /var/log/mail.log would have verbose details.

There are email troubleshooting guides here:
https://wiki.zoneminder.com/How_to_get_ ... Zoneminder
and
https://wiki.zoneminder.com/SMS_Notifications

i have tried changing the sendmail link to ssmtp and the same failure occurs.

i have added several logging calls in zm_filter to track the flow. i can see from the added log calls that control flow ends up at line 852:

$mail->send('sendmail', $ssmtp_location, $Config{ZM_EMAIL_ADDRESS});

the failure happens with this call. the $ssmtp_location and ZM_EMAIL_ADDRESS values are both correct. these is something else happening.

i actually go this working.

i realized that there were 2 instances of sendmail on my system: /usr/sbin/sendmail and /usr/lib/sendmail, zm seems to use /usr/lib/sendmail. i changed the soft links at both locations to ssmtp and now email works. i have no idea why it failed when the links pointed to msmtp because both ssmtp and msmtp are 100% compatible with sendmail so both should work. i guess i really don't care as long as email works.

Please see the link to get the details on How to use MSMTP as email software in Zoneminder
https://bkjaya.wordpress.com/2019/10/21 ... ntu-19-04/