There is no de-facto client here really for this, most people simply use their MTA (Mail Transport Agents) to relay and then use sendmail(1) or mail(1) to inject mail to their MTA's queue (either directly or through SMTP port 25)
Most Unix machines come with an MTA, generally one of Sendmaill, Postfix or Exim.
Postfix
In postfix you want to set your relayhost in /etc/postfix/main.cf (or whereever your main.cf configuration file is set).
relayhost = my.mailrelay.com
Sendmail
For sendmail, the term is called SMART_HOST and you can define it in sendmail.mc
define(`SMART_HOST',`my.mailrelay.com')
Exim
In Exim, change the "routers" section of your configuration and add
smarthost:
driver = domainlist
transport = remote_smtp
require_files = /etc/exim/smarthost
route_list = "* my.mailrelay.com"
Qmail
I've never seen Qmail come installed on a machine (mainly because of DJB's licensing terms) so it's probably not in your situation, but we might as well list the last of the big 4 MTA's in one place.
echo ":my.mailrelay.com" > /var/qmail/control/smtproutes
Notes*
Some people might say, use a script to inject messages to the remote SMTP server over port 25/487. This solution is flawed. SMTP is designed so that mail servers can temporarily reject mail for whatever reason. All SMTP servers have fallback mechanisms so that messages will be retried and retried. Now your script could implement this, but then you are going down the route of re-inventing the wheel. Practically every Linux system comes installed with an MTA and they're trivial to install on Linux and every other Unix system I've come across. Configuring them can be intimidating when you're starting off, but email is so ubiqutous you need to learn this if you want to administrate Unix-like machines.
If the remote SMTP server you are relaying through is simply allowing you to relay by IP, the above should be sufficient. However, it's possible the remote SMTP server you want to relay through will require you to use SMTP authentication, and/or SSL/TLS to relay through. In this case, you'll need to configure your MTA to provide these details.