Last updated on Monday 28th of February 2022 08:52:48 PM

©XSIBackup-Pro Classic: The SMTP server configuration database

How to fill the conf/smtpsrvs file.

 Please note that this post is relative to old deprecated software ©XSIBackup-Classic. Some facts herein contained may still be applicable to more recent versions though.

For new instalations please use new ©XSIBackup which is far more advanced than ©XSIBackup-Classic.

 Please note that you need to enable "Less Secure Apps" for your GMail account to work with XSIBackup.

The conf/smtpsrvs file hosts information about different (virtually no limit) SMTP servers. Each one of those servers is identified by a unique integer number starting at 1, that precedes the rest of the information in its row.

# You can add as many SMTP servers as you want
# Columns are separated by colons as described below
# One server per line pledging to the following format
# ORDINAL(integer):--smtp-srv(IP or FQDN):--smtp-port:--mail-from:--smtp-usr:--smtp-pwd:--smtp-auth(none|anystring):--smtp-sec(TLS|anystring):--smtp-delay(optional 1-4 sec)
# Example:
# 1:smtp.gmail.com:465:youremail@gmail.com:youremail@gmail.com:Y0urpassw0rd:yes:TLS:1


Each SMTP server entry is composed by 9 fields, being the latter (--smtp-delay) optional.

1 - The SMTP ordinal.

This field is just an integer positive number starting at 1. It cannot be repeated and must identify each SMTP server univocally.

2 - The SMTP server.

This entry must correspond to any SMTP server in your LAN or the internet, identified by its IP address or its FQDN. Please do remember that if you use a FQDN you need DNS enabled in your ESXi box.

3 - The SMTP port.

This is the port in which the above SMTP server is listening on.

4 - The Mail From address.

This field is an e-mail address where the e-mail will be sent from, it usually is the same as the SMTP user.

5 - The SMTP user.

This is the SMTP user that will authenticate against the SMTP server, same as --smtp-usr argument.

6 - The SMTP password.

The SMTP password used to authenticate against the SMTP server

7 - The SMTP Auth scheme.

This field only accepts one value "none", all other possible strings and values will be interpreted as "yes, use SMTP-AUTH", in the example we use a plain "yes".

8 - The SMTP security scheme.

This can be TLS or anything else, TLS will use TLS authentication, any other value will avoid using it. You need to set this to TLS when using GMail, per instance.

9 - SMTP delay.

This field introduces a delay between SMTP commands, this is not needed most of the times and this argument is optional, just don't use it unless you are absolutely sure that you need it.


Once you have finished configuring your SMTP server in the conf/smtpsrvs file, you can test it with the command.

# ./xsibackup --check-smtp=some@email.com --use-smtp=N


Where N is the number identifying the SMTP server.

To use this newly configured server in your backup jobs, just append:

... --mail-to=email@address.com --use-smtp=N


To the rest of arguments. You obviously don't need to parse anything but this two values: an e-mail address where to mail the results and an ordinal number (N), corresponding to the first field ORDINAL(integer) in the above configured SMTP server.