sending an email from a C/C++ program in linux - c++

Question

I would like to send an email to my gmail account everytime my simulation ends. I have tried searching the web and found sendEmail but it is timing-out. If anyone could point me out to a package or link that they tried I would be thankful.
Thanks

Answer 1

You could invoke your local MTA directly using popen() and feed it RFC822-compliant text.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>
int sendmail(const char *to, const char *from, const char *subject, const char *message)
{
int retval = -1;
FILE *mailpipe = popen("/usr/lib/sendmail -t", "w");
if (mailpipe != NULL) {
fprintf(mailpipe, "To: %s\n", to);
fprintf(mailpipe, "From: %s\n", from);
fprintf(mailpipe, "Subject: %s\n\n", subject);
fwrite(message, 1, strlen(message), mailpipe);
fwrite(".\n", 1, 2, mailpipe);
pclose(mailpipe);
retval = 0;
}
else {
perror("Failed to invoke sendmail");
}
return retval;
}
main(int argc, char** argv)
{
if (argc == 5) {
sendmail(argv[1], argv[2], argv[3], argv[4]);
}
}

Answer 2

libESMTP seems to be what you are looking for. It's very well documented and also seems to be under active development (last Release Candidate is from mid-January 2012). It also supports SSL and various authentication protocols.
There are example applications in the source package.

Answer 3

Both VMime and libcurl are good libraries for email sending (and more).

Answer 4

I like the answer of trojanfoe above, BUT in my case I needed to turn on an email sending agent.. an MTA to enable linux to send emails - I have found exim4 to be a relatively simple MTA to get working and that trojanfoe's program works very nicely with it.
to get it to work I used (on a debian type system in a virtual box (crunchbang linux))
sudo apt-get install exim
sudo apt-get install mailutils
I configured exim4 with
sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config
and I told the computer about my normal (remote) email address with
sudo emacs /etc/email-addresses
hope this might be useful as these were the steps I found worked to get my linux system sending email with trojanfoe's email program above

Answer 5

Do a fork exec and pipe the body to a program like sendmail/mail:
#include <string>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
using std::string;
static const int READEND = 0;
static const int WRITEEND = 1;
int sendEmail(const string& to, const string& subject, const string& body) {
int p2cFd[2];
int ret = pipe(p2cFd);
if (ret) {
return ret;
}
pid_t child_pid = fork();
if (child_pid < 0) {
close(p2cFd[READEND]);
close(p2cFd[WRITEEND]);
return child_pid;
}
else if (!child_pid) {
dup2(p2cFd[READEND], READEND);
close(p2cFd[READEND]);
close(p2cFd[WRITEEND]);
execlp("mail", "mail", "-s", subject.c_str(), to.c_str(), NULL);
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
close(p2cFd[READEND]);
ret = write(p2cFd[WRITEEND], body.c_str(), body.size());
if (ret < 0) {
return ret;
}
close(p2cFd[WRITEEND]);
if (waitpid(child_pid, &ret, 0) == -1) {
return ret;
}
return 0;
}
int main() {
return sendEmail("email#hostname.com", "Subject", "Body");
}