title: Different ways of sending e-mail from linux command line
body: <p>For our web projects, we need a reliable e-mail distribution mechanism. Due to bad experiences in the past, I have written a bash script (executed hourly) which sends a notification e-mail if</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>the qmail-send process is not running</li>
  <li>there are too many failures in the mail log</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>For sending the notification e-mail I obviously don't want to depend on qmail, since qmail will be unavailable if the qmail-send process is not running. However, the following command sends the notification e-mail via qmail:</p>
  
  <pre><code>echo "failure rate critical" | mail -s "qmail notification" my@email.com
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What's the easiest way to send e-mail from the linux command line without qmail? Can I use sendmail?</p>
  
  <p>If you guys have smarter alarm systems to monitor qmail, please let me know.</p>