You might want to use gmail as a smart-host to relay all messages sent from a given computer. A way to do it is to use ssmtp. Here is the basic configuration that you can add to /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf. Note that your credentials will be in this file in plain text form so you should not use this method to send email from an important email account.
root=postmaster hostname=localhost AuthUser=user@gmail.com AuthPass=usersecret FromLineOverride=YES mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587 UseSTARTTLS=YES
Then you can use mailx to send messages from crontabs, or you can also send backups. See simple-email-backup.
Last update: 2007-11-27 (Rev 13168)