[Discuss] send email from script as non-root

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

As part of my home automation, I want a process on my server (which is 
also my mail server) to send an email (actually an SMS throught he email 
gateway).? The process that needs to do it is not run as root though, 
it's running as a mortal user.? I've tried mail, sendmail, curl, etc and 
they complain

send-mail: fatal: open /etc/postfix/main.cf: Permission denied
Can't send mail: sendmail process failed with error code 75

If I make /etc/postfix o+rx? and make main.cf readable, it just fails on 
some other file in that directory, and I feel this path is going in an 
unsafe direction, so I made /etc/postfix 750 again.

I tried creating a script owned by root and setuid, and even then I got 
the same error, which confused me.? I put a "who am i" in the script and 
it said it was running with david (maybe it doesn't show effective UID???).

I guess I could add something to sudoers, but before I get too deep into 
this, are there better solutions for this that google isn't showing me? 
Have you faced this before?


Thanks