Then one / Wired It’s not a secret that is great for team communication. But what makes it shine is the to connect anything to your team’s channels. Slack ability “Botifying” a server If you run any servers at all, chances are they occasionally send you system notifications. And because they use the local mail delivery system, it’s likely you never get to read them or only when it’s too late – all local mail by default ends up in You need to SSH to the server to get a cute notification in the terminal. /var/spool/mail/root. You have new mail The common solution is to enable forwarding to an external email address. But this is unreliable because messages get often marked as spam or rejected by the receiving server—unless you take extra care to make your host look like a legit mail server to the outer world. Another issue is that Unix servers don’t come with a feature for some reason. Share in Slack Let’s quickly fix both: Add a new to your Slack team and copy the email address: email integration 2. Install a mail transport agent on your server, for example: $ yum -y install mailx postfix && systemctl enable postfix && systemctl start postfix 3. Enable forwarding of all mail to Slack: root $ echo your-token@your-team.slack.com > /root/.forward Done! You’ve just established a direct email line from your server to Slack. Let’s test it out: $ echo 'Hello, Slack!' | mail -s 'Check 123' root Or something a little bit more useful: $ pg_dump | mail -s 'DB backup' root …just kidding, don’t do that. But you get the idea. As you can see, you can now send messages from your server to Slack simply by mailing to . root By the way, this is what system services—such as , , and others—already use for notifications about important events and problems. So you’ll get those automatically to Slack as well: cron logwatch Mail from logwatch delivered to Slack

Slack hack: local mail delivery

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