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4 Tools Send Email with Subject, Body and Attachment in Linux
In today's article we will cover a few ways you can use to send emails with attachments from the command line interface on Linux. It can have quite a few uses, for example to send an archive with an application from an application server to email or you can use the commands in scripts to automate some process. For our examples,we will use the file foo.tar.gz as our attachment.
There are various ways to send emails from command line using different mail clients but here I am sharing few mail client utility used by most users like mailx, mutt and swaks.
All the tools we will present to you are very popular and present in the repositories of most Linux distributions, you can install them using the following commands:
For Debian / Ubuntu systems
apt-get install mutt
apt-get install swaks
apt-get install mailx
apt-get install sharutils
For Red Hat based systems like CentOS or Fedora
yum install mutt
yum install swaks
yum install mailx
yum install sharutils
1) Using mail / mailx
The mailx utility found as the default mailer application in most Linux distributions now includes the support to attach file. If it is not available you can easily install using the following commands please take note that this may not be supported in older versions, to check this you can use the command:
$ man mail
And the first line should look like this:
mailx [-BDdEFintv~] [-s subject] [-a attachment ] [-c cc-addr] [-b bcc-addr] [-r from-addr] [-h hops] [-A account] [-S variable[=value]] to-addr . . .
As you can see it supports the -a attribute to add a file to the email and -s attribute to subject to the email. Use few of below examples to send mails.
a) Simple Mail
Run the mail command, and then mailx would wait for you to enter the message of the email. You can hit enter for new lines. When done typing the message, press Ctrl+D and mailx would display EOT.
After than mailx automatically delivers the email to the destination.
$ mail user@example.com
HI,
Good Morning
How are you
EOT
b) To send email with subject
$ echo "Email text" | mail -s "Test Subject" user@example.com
-s is used for defining subject for email.
c) To send message from a file
$ mail -s "message send from file" user@example.com < /path/to/file
d) To send message piped using the echo command
$ echo "This is message body" | mail -s "This is Subject" user@example.com
e) To send email with attachment
$ echo “Body with attachment "| mail -a foo.tar.gz -s "attached file" user@example.com
-a is used for attachments
2) mutt
Mutt is a text-based email client for Unix-like systems. It was developed over 20 years ago and it's an important part of Linux history, one of the first clients to support scoring and threading capabilities. Use few of below examples to send email.
a) Send email with subject & body message from a file
$ mutt -s "Testing from mutt" user@example.com < /tmp/message.txt
b) To send body message piped using the echo command
$ echo "This is the body" | mutt -s "Testing mutt" user@example.com
c) To send email with attachment
$ echo "This is the body" | mutt -s "Testing mutt" user@example.com -a /tmp/foo.tar.gz
d) To send email with multiple attachments
$ echo "This is the body" | mutt -s "Testing" user@example.com -a foo.tar.gz –a bar.tar.gz
3) swaks
Swaks stands for Swiss Army Knife for SMTP and it is a featureful, flexible, scriptable, transaction-oriented SMTP test tool written and maintained by John Jetmore. You can use the following syntax to send an email with attachment:
$ swaks -t "foo@bar.com" --header "Subject: Subject" --body "Email Text" --attach foo.tar.gz
The important thing about Swaks is that it will also debug the full mail transaction for you, so it is a very useful tool if you also wish to debug the mail sending process:
As you can see it gives you full details about the sending process including what capabilities the receiving mail server supports, each step of the transaction between the 2 servers.
4) uuencode
Email transport systems were originally designed to transmit characters with a seven-bit encoding -- like ASCII. This meant they could send messages with plain text but not "binary" text, such as program files or image files that used all of an eight-bit byte. The program is used to solve this limitation is “uuencode”( "UNIX to UNIX encoding") which encode the mail from binary format to text format that is safe to transmit & program is used to decode the data is called “uudecode”
We can easily send binary text such as a program files or image files using uuencode with mailx or mutt email client is shown by following example:
$ uuencode example.jpeg example.jpeg | mail user@example.com
Shell Script : Explain how to send email
#!/bin/bash
FROM=""
SUBJECT=""
ATTACHMENTS=""
TO=""
BODY=""
# Function to check if entered file names are really files
function check_files()
{
output_files=""
for file in $1
do
if [ -s $file ]
then
output_files="${output_files}${file} "
fi
done
echo $output_files
}
echo "*********************"
echo "E-mail sending script."
echo "*********************"
echo
# Getting the From address from user
while [ 1 ]
do
if [ ! $FROM ]
then
echo -n -e "Enter the e-mail address you wish to send mail from:\n[Enter] "
else
echo -n -e "The address you provided is not valid:\n[Enter] "
fi
read FROM
echo $FROM | grep -E '^.+@.+$' > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
break
fi
done
echo
# Getting the To address from user
while [ 1 ]
do
if [ ! $TO ]
then
echo -n -e "Enter the e-mail address you wish to send mail to:\n[Enter] "
else
echo -n -e "The address you provided is not valid:\n[Enter] "
fi
read TO
echo $TO | grep -E '^.+@.+$' > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
break
fi
done
echo
# Getting the Subject from user
echo -n -e "Enter e-mail subject:\n[Enter] "
read SUBJECT
echo
if [ "$SUBJECT" == "" ]
then
echo "Proceeding without the subject..."
fi
# Getting the file names to attach
echo -e "Provide the list of attachments. Separate names by space.
If there are spaces in file name, quote file name with \"."
read att
echo
# Making sure file names are poiting to real files
attachments=$(check_files "$att")
echo "Attachments: $attachments"
for attachment in $attachments
do
ATTACHMENTS="$ATTACHMENTS-a $attachment "
done
echo
# Composing body of the message
echo "Enter message. To mark the end of message type ;; in new line."
read line
while [ "$line" != ";;" ]
do
BODY="$BODY$line\n"
read line
done
SENDMAILCMD="mutt -e \"set from=$FROM\" -s \"$SUBJECT\" \
$ATTACHMENTS -- \"$TO\" <<< \"$BODY\""
echo $SENDMAILCMD
mutt -e "set from=$FROM" -s "$SUBJECT" $ATTACHMENTS -- $TO <<< $BODY
Script Output
$ bash send_mail.sh
*********************
E-mail sending script.
*********************
Enter the e-mail address you wish to send mail from:
[Enter] test@gmail.com
Enter the e-mail address you wish to send mail to:
[Enter] test@gmail.com
Enter e-mail subject:
[Enter] Message subject
Provide the list of attachments. Separate names by space.
If there are spaces in file name, quote file name with ".
send_mail.sh
Attachments: send_mail.sh
Enter message. To mark the end of message type ;; in new line.
This is a message
text
;;
Conclusion
There are many ways of send emails from command line / shell script but here we have shared 4 tools available for unix / linux based distros. Hope you enjoyed reading our article and please provide your valuable comments and also let us know if you know about any new tools.
via: http://linoxide.com/linux-shell-script/send-email-subject-body-attachment-linux/
作者：Bobbin Zachariah 译者：译者ID 校对：校对者ID