How To Send an Email With Attachment and Body from Linux

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• kyanh December 30, 2009, 3:14 am

  I found that sendEmail is more comfortable and easy

  sendEmail -a

  sendEmails has binary package on Ubuntu, for e.g

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• hdaz December 30, 2009, 3:15 am

  Erm most people would probably have to setup mail first ??

  send-mail: Cannot open mail:25
  Can’t send mail: sendmail process failed with error code 1

  ∞
• Chris F.A. Johnson December 30, 2009, 5:18 am

  “$ cat body-message.txt | mail -s “Email testing from Linux” ramesh@thegeekstuff.com”

  UUOC

  mail -s “Email testing from Linux” ramesh@thegeekstuff.com < body-message.txt

  ∞
• Rk December 30, 2009, 5:21 am

  When I send mail using above command I am getting two mails
  One mail with body and another mail with body and attachment.
  Do we need to configure any settings for mail ??

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• Mahesh December 30, 2009, 7:21 am

  I have found mutt to be a lot useful for sending attachment.

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• Ed Deloye December 30, 2009, 7:46 am

  You can do the same thing with mutt:

  mutt -s ‘subject’ -i file1 -a file2 -c user1@domain -b user2@domain user3@doman </dev/null

  -s Specify the subject of the message.
  -i Specify a file to include into the body of a message.
  -a Attach a file to your message using MIME.
  -c Specify a carbon-copy (CC) recipient
  -b Specify a blind-carbon-copy (BCC) recipient

  The redirect from /dev/null prevents mutt from going into interactive mode

  ∞
• John December 30, 2009, 10:46 am

  I have for a long time used a little app called “email” from http://www.cleancode.org/projects/email .. It compiles easily and has served me really well. It will use your favourite console editor to write the body text, attach files very easily, cat text from a file for body text, use a sig line if wanted and I believe it even has a simple addressbook and some other tricks, like multiple attachments very simply.

  I almost only use it from scripts though, backing up configs and stuff to a file dump email address

  ∞
• Frank Daley December 30, 2009, 3:25 pm

  I think that mutt is a lot simpler. For example, it can be installed on Fedora

  yum -y install mutt

  To use it is simply

  mutt -s “Subject text” emailaddress < filetosend.odt

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• felipealvarez January 3, 2010, 10:47 pm

  mail -s subject email@domain < filetosend
  base64 filetosend | mail -s subject email@domain

  The above two do not 'attach' the file to message. Instead, they are in the BODY of the message. Why is this?

  Using opensuse 11.2 (postfix)

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• Silviu Marin-Caea January 5, 2010, 2:58 am

  On opensuse 11.2 do this:
  echo text body | mail -s “Subject line” -a attachment.txt person@internet.com

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• hideaki January 15, 2010, 3:57 am

  cat-uuencode-and-a-pie is pretty lame. There ought to be some tool that does a proper MIME packing of the mail.

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• Carl January 25, 2010, 11:29 am

  How about

  cat mail.txt | mutt -a attachment -s subject me@to.com

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• Martin October 7, 2010, 9:07 am

  Thanks a bunch. That last part about emailing both an attachment and a body file was exactly what I needed. We’re moving from AIX to Linux and I needed to find a replacement for metasend. We have a lot of programs that use metasend. Instead of changing 60 programs, I now have a 60 line script to parse out the info from the metasend command and pass it to uuencode and mail. Fantastic.

  Thanks Again,

  Martin

  ∞
• Network-Engineer February 24, 2011, 6:26 am

  Hi

  First congrats on your daughter’s birth. Be happy and be safe. I have a question related to postfix. I want to monitor one single email user of my domain. e.g. i want to monitor ne@xyz.com how many emails it has sent out, how many sent successfully, how many rejected and how many deffered. now i have a script with me that works fine for me and give me output like how many total ne@xyz..com sent out, how many rejected and how many deffered. i’m goin to share this script with you here. what i want to add to this script is that it should give me the email addresses that are rejected. you know what i mean. it current tells me 750 emails are sent by this user. 200 rejected 100 deffered etc i want to know what email addresses are rejected. so if 200 are rejected it should give me 200 emails address aswell so i can see if there is spell mistake or something. here is the script. please have a look at this. or if you know any other software to monitor this kindly let me know. i want to moniter my postfix user who is sending out newsletters. i want reports how many are sent how many rejected how many deffered etc. which rejected emails.

  here is script that i am using but it’s not givin me emails rejected. just the counts.

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  # vim:ts=2:sw=2:expandtab:cindent

  ### MAKE MODIFICATIONS FOR DATE AND SENDING EMAIL ADDRESS HERE ###

  #$date=”Oct 14[5-9]”;
  $date=”Dec 18″;
  #$sender=”(.*)\@domain.com”; # Matches any sender from domain.com
  #$sender=”username\@domain.com”; # Matches abc@domain.com
  $sender=”user\@domain.com”; # Matches user@domain.com

  ### END OF USER MODIFICATIONS ###

  $sent = 0;
  $bounced = 0;
  $deferred = 0;

  $logFile=”/var/log/maillog”;
  open LOGFILE, “<", $logFile;
  @rawLogs = ;
  close LOGFILE;

  $date =~ s/^([A-Z][a-z]{2})( )([0-9])$/$1 $3/;
  printf(“%s %s\n”,$sender, $date);

  if ( grep(/(^[A-Z][a-z]{2} [0-9])$/, $date) ) {
  $field = 6;
  } else {
  $field = 5;
  }

  @logs = grep(/$date .* postfix\/qmgr\[[0-9]+\]: .* from=/i, @rawLogs);
  foreach (@logs) {
  @line = split(/ /);
  push(@msgIds, $line[$field]);
  }

  @sent = grep (/status=sent/, @rawLogs);
  @bounced = grep (/status=bounced/, @rawLogs);

  @ids = grep {defined} map {
  if (exists $u{$_}) {
  undef;
  } else {
  $u{$_}=undef; $_;
  }
  } @msgIds;

  undef %u;

  $i=0;
  $cnt = $#ids + 1;
  foreach $id(@ids) {
  $final=0;
  if (grep(/$id/, @sent)) {
  $sent++;
  $final=1;
  } elsif (grep(/$id/, @bounced)) {
  $bounced++;
  $final=1;
  }
  if ($final != 1) {
  $deferred++;
  }
  $i++;
  }
  print “Messages Delivered: $sent\n”;
  print “Messages Bounced: $bounced\n”;
  print “Messages Deferred: $deferred\n”;
  print “Total Sent: “. ( $sent + $bounced + $deferred ) .”\n”;

  ∞
• David Beecher June 10, 2012, 12:17 pm

  This method of attaching files hasn’t worked for a long time. Very few (outlook at one time) clients today will recognize and decode embedded UUENCODED data and even fewer will recognize base64 encoding in an UUENCODED message.

  This link has a better answer AND several variations depending on your environment.

  Good luck,
  David

  ∞
• ram August 2, 2012, 1:40 pm

  hi,

  thanks its very helpful…..

  Thanks for sharing

  -Ram

  ∞
• Kuldeepak September 23, 2012, 6:30 am

  I am new to linux, i used mail command to send file from linux machine to my email account using linux command.

  But it is taking too much time to deliver the email to my email account.

  Could any one help me in order to shorten this delay time in between the sending and receiving of emails from the linux machine.

  I need this help on urgent basis.

  I will be very thankful to you guyz.

  ∞
• Ashok October 12, 2012, 10:37 am

  Your post is so Helpful…
  Thanks so much for sharing this information.

  ∞
• Stefan October 24, 2012, 10:01 am

  Does anybody read the man pages?
  If you have a newer version of sendmail you just can use -a

  echo “Body text” |mail -s “Subject” -a /var/tmp/file.txt test@test.com

  ∞
• Rahul Gupta February 16, 2013, 12:13 pm

  HI friends

  I ran below command to send mail.but i did not get mail in my inbox.

  Please help me out to resolve this problem.

  “echo “file_to_send” | nail -s “Your File” -a mail_id.txt mail@gmail.com”

  Yesterday i ran same command then it worked for me. i just rebooted the fedora machine, after that the problem occurred. please help me whether i have to chamge some setting or any thing else..

  Thanks in advance..

  ∞
• hdaz February 17, 2013, 4:37 am

  @Rahul

  is sendmail or postfix running ?
  service sendmail status
  service postfix status

  yes or no if no then start them
  service sendmail start
  next is it starting after a reboot
  chkconfig –list |egrep “sendmail | postfix”

  yes no if no then start which ever one you have installed
  chkconfig –level 35 sendmail on

  still got a problem have a look in the mailq
  mailq

  or look in /var/log/maillog to see any errors

  ∞
• Rahul Gupta February 17, 2013, 10:31 am

  Hi hdaz,

  Thanks for your help.

  I saw my “/var/spool/mail/root” logs it sowing below error

  ” The IP you’re using to send email is not authorized…”

  Please help me out to resolve this problem

  Thanks in advance

  ∞
• hdaz February 17, 2013, 10:33 am

  take it your trying to send to gmail..
  http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10336

  ∞
• Rahul Gupta February 17, 2013, 10:44 am

  Hey,
  Thanks.
  Now i am able to send mail..

  But all my mails are going in spam..

  Now what should i do to get them in inbox instead of spam,

  ∞
• jorge March 7, 2014, 5:41 pm

  Excelent , the solution to send a mail including an attached file, was great. Really Thank you.

  Success

  ∞
• Nitesh June 30, 2014, 5:58 am

  Works great . I am recieving the mail in spam folder .Is that related to sendmail configuration ? If so whats configuration I should apply .

  Thanks for the post .It helped 🙂

  ∞
• Matt March 17, 2015, 9:26 am

  I had to remove the () and \ from the third example showing how to send an attachment and a body. Worked for me!

  ∞
• Raghu October 28, 2015, 9:26 am

  Excellent work Ramesh! It worked like magic.

  ∞