<p>I have a computer at home which I can't access from work.  I'd like to be able to view results from work that my home computer produces.  The best idea I've come up with is an automated script running on my home computer that emails myself the results (from a text file or stderr/out) when complete.  </p>

<p>I'm decent with bash (I have a <em>linux</em> machine) and java, so an answer using either or both of those would be ideal, but if there's something easier that's fine too.</p>

<p>I typically use gmail, but also have yahoo mail.  </p>

<p>My question is this: what would be the basic steps in solving this problem?  I can do the nitty gritty stuff, but can't really get the big picture of how something like this would work.</p>

<p>Please help.</p>

<p>jbu</p>

Traditionaly, with unix systems like Linux, you'd have an MTA, a mail transfer agent, on the computer that deals with sending e-mail.
This could be a full blown e-mail server like exim, or something simple like ssmtp that just sends messages on to a relaying SMTP server such as would be provided by your ISP.
This isn't neccessarily the case anymore, since mail clients like Thunderbird include their own MTA, much like mail clients on Windows do.
However, it is likely that your distro will install some MTA or other by default, if for no other reason than the fact that other things on your system, like cron, want to be able to send e-mail. Generally there will be a command line tool called sendmail (sendmail being the original MTA [citation needed], other MTAs maintain compatability with its interface and it has sort of become the standard) that can be used from a shell script to send an e-mail.