How can I send an email through the UNIX mailx command?

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How can I send an email through the UNIX mailx command?

10 Answers

an example

$ echo "something" | mailx -s "subject" recipient@somewhere.com

to send attachment

$ uuencode file file | mailx -s "subject" recipient@somewhere.com

and to send attachment AND write the message body

$ (echo "something\n" ; uuencode file file) | mailx -s "subject" recipient@somewhere.com

From the man page:

Sending mail

To send a message to one or more people, mailx can be invoked with arguments which are the names of people to whom the mail will be sent. The user is then expected to type in his message, followed by an ‘control-D’ at the beginning of a line.

In other words, mailx reads the content to send from standard input and can be redirected to like normal. E.g.:

ls -l $HOME | mailx -s "The content of my home directory" someone@email.adr

Here is a multifunctional function to tackle mail sending with several attachments:

enviaremail() {
values=$(echo "$@" | tr -d '\n')
listargs=()
listargs+=($values)
heirloom-mailx $( attachment=""
for (( a = 5; a < ${#listargs[@]}; a++ )); do
attachment=$(echo "-a ${listargs[a]} ")
echo "${attachment}"
done) -v -s "${titulo}" \
-S smtp-use-starttls \
-S ssl-verify=ignore \
-S smtp-auth=login \
-S smtp=smtp://$1 \
-S from="${2}" \
-S smtp-auth-user=$3 \
-S smtp-auth-password=$4 \
-S ssl-verify=ignore \
$5 < ${cuerpo}
}

function call: enviaremail "smtp.mailserver:port" "from_address" "authuser" "'pass'" "destination" "list of attachments separated by space"

Note: Remove the double quotes in the call

In addition please remember to define externally the $titulo (subject) and $cuerpo (body) of the email prior to using the function

If you want to send more than two person or DL :

echo "Message Body" | mailx -s "Message Title" -r sender@someone.com receiver1@someone.com,receiver_dl@.com

here:

  • -s = subject or mail title
  • -r = sender mail or DL
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