How to use Mail in Bash ?

[Mr Tux]

Hi !

How to send an email to an emailadress on the internet, ex info@company.com by using the Mail program in Bash ?

Is there some configuration to do before ?

[jim]

mail you@somewhere.com

CTRL D to send

[srs]

Hi, a simple use of mail is as follows:

& mail -s 'Subject' info@company.com < msg.txt

where -s specifies the subject. Prepare your message (msg.txt) as follows:

From: your.address@foo.com
To: info@company.com (mandatory)
Subject: (optional)
Cc: (optional)
Bcc: (optional)

Your message

Send a message to your self and try :o)

Best wishes, SRS

[linux_paul]

mail -s 'Subject' info@company.com < msg.txt

would also work in a bash script.

[Mr Tux]

[MrTux@localhost ~]$ /home/MrTux/dead.letter... Saved message in /home/MrTux/dead.letter

What have I missed ?

I want to send to the Internetemailadress but i only get a 'dead.letter'

I have sendmail installed but is there something to do with that before its working ?

[RupertPupkin]

The problem with the standard 'mail' command is that it assumes that the machine it is running on is a full-fledged SMTP server. So unless you've configured your machine to be a bonafide mail server (or to act as an SMTP relay), then your mail will not go anywhere outside your machine (i.e. it will only work for addresses local to your machine, e.g. some_user@localhost). There is no way to specify an external SMTP server (like your ISP's) to use with the 'mail' command. That's why you're getting a dead letter.

If you want a command-line mailer that does support using an external SMTP server, then get nail from Fedora Extras. Nail supports specifying an external SMTP server. You can do this on a per-mail basis, like this:

nail -r "myaddress@something.com" -s "Some subject" -S smtp=some.smtp.server info@company.com < msg.txt

or you can permanently set the SMTP server in your ~/.mailrc file (or /etc/nail.rc if you want to set it system-wide), which removes the need for using the "-S smtp=..." option on the command-line:

set smtp=some.smtp.server

See the nail man page for more details. In my opinion, no one should be using 'mail' anymore, nail is vastly superior.

[srs]

For simple mails, an alternative is to use Python. nail is better than my very simple Python script put together before bed time, though :o)

#!/usr/bin/env python

# Usage: ./mail.py

import sys
import smtplib

def prompt(prompt):
    return raw_input(prompt).strip()

def create_message():
    fromaddr = prompt('From: ')
    toaddrs  = prompt('To: ').split()
    subject  = prompt('Subject: ')
    print 'Enter message, end with ^D (Unix) or ^Z (Windows): '
    msg = ('From: %s\r\nTo: %s\r\nSubject: %s\r\n\n' \
            % (fromaddr, ', '.join(toaddrs), subject))
    while 1:
        try:
            line = sys.stdin.readline()
        except EOFError:
            break
        if not line:
            break
        msg = msg + line
    return fromaddr, toaddrs, msg

def send_mail(fromaddr, toaddrs, msg):
    server = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
    server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddrs, msg)
    server.quit()

def main():
    [fromaddr, toaddrs, msg] = create_message()
    send_mail(fromaddr, toaddrs, msg)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Best wishes, SRS

[RupertPupkin]

For simple mails, an alternative is to use Python. nail is better than my very simple Python script put together before bed time, though :o)

Well, nail has a lot of options, like the ability to send attachments easily, so I'd agree that nail is better.

[Mr Tux]

Thanks alot for the information.
I skip Mail then and install nail instead.

Update info from Internet:
As of March 2006, nail has been integrated into the Heirloom project as mailx.
http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html

Thanx

Mr Tux

[RupertPupkin]

In Fedora 13 the old mail command has been replaced by nail, which is now called Mailx, and /bin/mail is just a link to /bin/mailx. So now mail works as users expect it to.