Sending email or mail with attachment from command or shell prompt

If you are looking to send email with attachment via shell script or at shell prompt/command line (read as bash prompt), use mutt command.

Mutt is a small but very powerful text based program for reading electronic mail under UNIX /Linux operating systems, including support for color terminals, MIME, and a threaded sorting mode.

Please note that mutt is a pure MUA and cannot send e-mail without proper email server . You need a working Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) such as sendmail or postfix. I am assuming that you have configured email server.

Install mutt

If mutt is not installed, use apt-get or yum or up2date command as follows (login as a root user):

(A) Debian Linux / Ubuntu Linux user use following command to install mutt:
# apt-get install mutt

B) Fedora / CentOS or Red Hat Linux (RHEL) user can use following command to install mutt:
# yum install mutt
OR
# up2date mutt

C) FreeBSD user use following command to install mutt via pkg_add command:
# pkg_add -v -r mutt

How do I send email attachments from a command prompt?

1) Use mutt command as follows to send an email with attachment:
$ mutt -s "Test mail" -a /tmp/file.tar.gz vivek@nixcraft.co.in < /tmp/mailmessage.txt

Where,

• vivek@nixcraft.co.in – is the recipient
• /tmp/mailmessage.txt – is the main body of the e-mail (read message from the file “mailmessage.txt”)
• /tmp/file.tar.gz – is an attachment (with option -a)
• “Test mail” – is a subject line (option -s)
• 
  

SEND MAIL BASH SCRIPT

put in a shell script:

#!/bin/bash

# script to send simple email

# email subject

SUBJECT="SET-EMAIL-SUBJECT"

# Email To ?

EMAIL="admin@somewhere.com"

# Email text/message

EMAILMESSAGE="/tmp/emailmessage.txt"

echo "This is an email message test"> $EMAILMESSAGE

echo "This is email text" >>$EMAILMESSAGE

# send an email using /bin/mail

/bin/mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$EMAIL" < $EMAILMESSAGE