mail: send email with attachment from commandline

Question

I know how to send an email from command line (script)

echo "body" | mail -s "subject" my@email.com

Is it possible to send attachments from commandline (script) as well?

I am using heirloom-mailx on Debian Wheezy.

man mail didn't hint me a thing, so I suppose people do not use the standard mail in your UNIX or UNIX-like OS, or they just use another UNIX or UNIX-like OS. — 41754, Nov 21 '13 at 14:52
See the answer in the duplicate I marked, it shows how to do this. — slm, Nov 21 '13 at 22:30

score 20 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 01 '17 at 15:34

20

The simple way: to use uuencode (part of sharutils package). Any formatting or body text are unavailable. Just a email with attachement and custom subject.

uuencode /path/to/file file_name.ext | mail -s subject my@email.com

The complex way: to use sendmail and html formatting:

v_mailpart="$(uuidgen)/$(hostname)"
echo "To: my@email.com
Subject: subject
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"$v_mailpart\"
MIME-Version: 1.0

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--$v_mailpart
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Disposition: inline

<html><body>Message text itself.</body></html>

--$v_mailpart
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name=file_name.ext
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=file_name.ext

`base64 /path/to/file`
 --$v_mailpart--" | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t

in case with several attachments last part may be repeated.

edited Apr 01 '17 at 15:34

kenorb

20,988

answered Nov 21 '13 at 14:56

rush

27,403

1

The message text does not have to be html, you can use text/plain – glenn jackman Nov 21 '13 at 18:59
@glennjackman yes, that's right. thanks for your note. – rush Nov 21 '13 at 19:01
Thanks, but this does not work as I intended: uuencode /path/to/file file_name.ext | mail -s subject my@email.com I get the email, but instead of attachment, I see the uuencoded text in the body. i.e. there is no "attachment" displayed, no way to "save" the attachment. The only way I can imagine is to cut and paste the text and run it through uuencode again. – Martin Vegter Nov 22 '13 at 22:16

score 14 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 21 '13 at 15:24

14

With mutt instead of mail you would simply call

echo "body" | mutt -s "subject" -a attachment0 attachment1 [...] -- my@email.com

Here, attachmentN are the list of files that you want to attach.

answered Nov 21 '13 at 15:24

tkrennwa

3,525
1
15
17

Does it allow to specify a custom From address? – golimar Nov 24 '20 at 08:57
You could use -e for setting a custom From: header, see also http://mutt.org/doc/manual/#my-hdr
mutt -e "my_hdr From: My Name <me@example.com>" ...
– tkrennwa Nov 24 '20 at 13:10
Works but with a strange result: https://imgur.com/a/GDwF2kn – golimar Nov 24 '20 at 15:36
I guess you need to configure your outgoing mail server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_submission_agent – tkrennwa Nov 24 '20 at 19:55

mail: send email with attachment from commandline

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