mail / mailx question

[Chandler, Scott]

Greetings,

I'm new to the list so I'm not sure if this is the proper place to post questions like this. If not, please let me know the right place.

We're using Nagios to monitor our equipment. It sends alerts through a locally installed copy of sendmail to our (end user) email server which then goes out to a pager. If the email server goes down, it won't do much good to send the alert to that server so I need an alternate alert which sends email through an outside address.

Does anyone know the syntax for the mail command to send to a different SMTP server? It looks like there are a couple ways to do this, use the account switch, use an alternate .mailrc/mail.rc file, maybe more.

Ideally, I'd like to have a standalone command without using a config file or script.

Thanks in advance,
Scott