How can I get email notifications, or any alerts, from a stand-alone installation on ubuntu 16.04

Question

Being an optimistic sort I thought I would try again to use the Sophos free edition on linux, now version ubuntu 16.04 
 It does run, but I need some form of alert system. email would seem easiest but there seems to be no way to get sophos to send to gmail, since I cannot specify my username & password or authentication option in the configuration file (savconfig) unless there is a secret way to do this? I notice there's no GUI any more to help, but I can use the command line tools. 
 No other pop-up alerts are ever seen as far as I can see, contrary to the configuration guide information. 
 My configuration is currently: 
 Email: -my-email-address- EmailDemandSummaryIfThreat: true EmailLanguage: English EmailNotifier: true EmailServer: smtp.gmail.com:465 EnableOnStart: true ExclusionEncodings: UTF-8 EUC-JP ISO-8859-1 LogMaxSizeMB: 100 NotifyOnUpdate: true PrimaryUpdateSourcePath: sophos: PrimaryUpdateUsername: - my sophos user name PrimaryUpdatePassword: ******** UploadSamples: false SendErrorEmail: true SendThreatEmail: true UINotifier: true UIpopupNotification: true UIttyNotification: true UpdatePeriodMinutes: 60 NamedScans Not configured LiveProtection: enabled ScanArchives: mixed 
 In the log I get loads of: 
 20:02:01 (3878): Examining 2017-02-27.16-58-54.oTuvpE (on 3878) 20:02:01 (3878): Retrying 2017-02-27.16-58-54.oTuvpE (on 3878) 20:02:01 (3878): Emailing -me-email-address- via smtp.gmail.com:465 20:02:11 (3878): SMTPException while attempting to send email: Connection unexpectedly closed 
 There must be a way to get this tool to tell a user what's going on, but this is around the 3rd time in 3 years I've tried, and still failed. People trell me I should have a virus checker on linux, but having one that keeps its detections secret is as bad as having no checker at all. 
 HELP! Please! I can't believe even a free tool from such a respected company can be so limited.

QC · Accepted Answer

Hello pastim, 
 no other pop-up alerts if I go to the EICAR site and download the testfile I get a nice pop-up. Similar if a run an on-demand scan on the Downloads folder (or open it). You should get UI notifications if you're logged in. 
 As to the email notifier: It's kept simple because usually it's only needed if you have one or more unattended Linux boxes in which case you likely have some local SMTP server (e.g. postfix or sendmail) that can optionally be configured to forward the mail to whatever account is desired. 
 Christian

QC · Answer

Hello pastim, 
 when it comes to Linux I consider myself as simple folk [:)]. Personally I don't deem email notifications that important for the reasons already mentioned. a whole new set of investigations might not be necessary after reading Configure Postfix to Send Mail Using Gmail ... . 
 Christian

pastim · Answer

Well I've come to solutions that work. Thanks to both of you. I'm using postfix. 
 I can now either send emails to a local email client (user@localhost) or to my gmail account, just by setting the savconfig Email parameter to one or the other. The EmailServer is set to localhost. 
 I followed these instructions for the local variant: https://gist.github.com/raelgc/6031274 . I added a local account to Thunderbird and set its smtp server to be for that account as well, just for local mail, so I could test it by manually sending an email from thunderbird to itself. All my other mail still goes via gmail smtp. 
 I the followed these instructions to get the local mail server to send to my external gmail server: https://www.linode.com/docs/email/postfix/configure-postfix-to-send-mail-using-gmail-and-google-apps-on-debian-or-ubuntu . Since postfix was already installed I reconfigured it for the Inernet using: dpkg-reconfigure postfix . 
 In both cases, the test text from http://www.eicar.org/86-0-Intended-use.html was an essential tool to see what worked and what didn't. 
 I can now move on from my desktop to my headless system and use gmail for alerts, even if away and listening to music steaming remotely from home. 
 I'll mark this answered. If anyone else is trying to do this and struggling, feel free to ask and I'll try to answer from an ubuntu 16.04/10 perspective.