Running vSMTP

Now that vSMTP is configured, here are a few options to launch an instance of the server.

Daemon

If you installed vSMTP via the debian packages, a vsmtp.service file has been registered into your system. Using systemctl, you can start your vsmtp instance with:

systemctl start vsmtp

Source code

If you want to build vSMTP from it’s source code, see the dedicated chapter to download and build the source code.

Then you can run the following command:

./target/release/vsmtp -c /etc/vsmtp/vsmtp.vsl --no-daemon --stdout

This commands run vSMTP in the foreground without creating the daemon and printing all logs to stdout. Remove or add vSMTP options as you see fit. (you can type ./target/release/vsmtp --help to get a list of available options)

Testing vSMTP

To test if your instance works properly, emulate a transaction with your favorite software.

Here is an example with curl with a vSMTP instance listening on localhost and port 10025.

curl -vv -k --url 'smtp://localhost:10025'                                  \                                     
    --mail-from 'john.doe@example.com' --mail-rcpt 'jenny.doe@example.com'  \
    # Provide an email to curl.
    --upload-file /tmp/mail.txt