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up vote 60 down vote favorite
36

How to send mail from the command line?

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14 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

Try to install The Mutt E-mail Client. Other option is using emacs with gnus. Others options available too... IMHO, you should use more details in your questions, or several different answers to your question you will receive :-)

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1  
Accepted this one since it doesn't require any configuration and is quite user-friendly. – Olivier Lalonde Nov 13 '10 at 21:00
3  
wait. mutt - user friendly? the craziest one-liner I've read today :) – Stann Apr 21 '11 at 22:19
up vote 51 down vote

  • Install ssmtp Install ssmtp: sudo apt-get install ssmtp

  • Edit the ssmtp config file : gksu gedit /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

  • Enter this in the file:
    root=username@gmail.com
    mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:465
    rewriteDomain=gmail.com
    AuthUser=username
    AuthPass=password
    FromLineOverride=YES
    UseTLS=YES

  • Enter the email address of the person who will receive your email:

    ssmtp recepient_name@gmail.com

  • Now enter this:
    To: recipient_name@gmail.com
    From: username@gmail.com
    Subject: Sent from a terminal!


    Your content goes here. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing.

  • To send the email: Ctrl + D

You can also save the text mentioned in Point 5 into a text file and send it using:

ssmtp recipient_name@gmail.com < filename.txt
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1  
Why did you use images for text? It would be handy to be able to just copy and paste the config file text. – DoR Nov 12 '10 at 22:04
1  
Fixed it. I just figured out that I could use html here. :) – Sid Nov 12 '10 at 22:37
6  
It feels wierd leaving my email password exposed in some file on the computer. Is this safe? – oadams Nov 13 '10 at 2:50
1  
@oadams not very safe. Use 2-step verification to lower your risk, or use a mail gateway that doesn't require a password, like your ISP's. – itsadok Mar 25 '12 at 13:54
Don't install ssmtp on a server with postfix installed. Postfix will be removed. Instead, just use sendmail user@example.com < file.txt which will work with either postfix or ssmtp. – Alistair Buxton Dec 9 '12 at 22:05
up vote 31 down vote

Most of the time you shouldn't need to configure an SMTP server you can simply use mail from the commandline. (Or if you're on a server where sendmail is configured, etc)

marco@dagobah:~$ mail -v marco.ceppi.use@gmail.com
Subject: Hello World!
This is an email to myself.

Hope all is well.
.
Cc:

You terminate messages with a . on a single line. That's when mail will prompt you for Cc: enter the information (or leave blank) and mail will then print out additional information on what it is attempting to do, as well as detailing the processing of connecting, transmitting, and receiving data from the mail server.

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6  
I would append the answer to include "sudo apt-get install mailutils" since it is not present on a clean Ubuntu 10.04 install. Also, terminating the message with a . on a single line didn't work. I had to "Ctrl-D" instead. Lastly, the message didn't go through! – Olivier Lalonde Nov 13 '10 at 20:40
Edit: the mail didn't go through because of my ISP nevermind. See askubuntu.com/questions/13072/… – Olivier Lalonde Nov 13 '10 at 20:59
Is there a way to send an attachment with this? My primary usage is to send a file to an e-mail address. – soandos Mar 17 at 3:46
up vote 13 down vote 
apt-get install libio-socket-ssl-perl libnet-ssleay-perl sendemail

usage:

sendemail -f fromuser@gmail.com -t touser@domain.com -u subject -m "message" -s smtp.gmail.com -o tls=yes -xu gmailaccount -xp gmailpassword

If you don't want to specify your password in the command line (generally not a good thing to do), you can omit that parameter and sendemail will prompt you for the password... and display it on the screen, but at least it won't be in your command line history.

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Sending mail from a GMail account using sendmail most certainty very handy. Thank you. – Mark Tomlin Mar 5 at 17:09
up vote 11 down vote

mpack is excellent commandline way of sending file attachments.

apt-get install mpack

usage:

mpack -s "file you wanted" ./data.pdf loser@supergoober.cn
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up vote 4 down vote

I have never tried it but there is a mail command that can send mail. See man mail.

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up vote 4 down vote

sudo apt-get install sharutils mailutils

uuencode filename filename | mail user@example.com

where filename is the same, it's stands for infile and remotefile

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sudo apt-get install sharutils for uuencode – Janus Troelsen Oct 19 '12 at 22:53
up vote 3 down vote

If you try to send e-mail from a system, whitch does not run an own e-mail-server (i. e. desktop system), you need to install something like nullmailer or esmtp, which forward your local mail to a "real" mail server.

As command line tools you can install mail or mailx (packages mailutils, heirloom-mailx or bsd-mailx). If you need attachments try biabam.

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up vote 3 down vote

You can send an email from the command line with TelNet or NetCat.

Everything is explained here.

hanoo@hp_laptop% nc 127.0.0.1 25
220 hp_laptop.localdomain ESMTP Postfix
EHLO man
250 hp_laptop.localdomain
MAIL FROM: <netcat@postfix.com>
250 2.1.0 Ok
RCPT TO: <target@host.com>
250 2.1.5 Ok
data
354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>
This is the body of my mail,
this is the second line...
.
250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 9C12E7F404
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1  
It's a little hard to use SSL when using this method ;) – iX3 Dec 30 '12 at 23:09
up vote 2 down vote

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=780509 may help you.

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up vote 2 down vote 
mail -s "subjet" -a "attchedfile_name" someone@dest_email.com

or

cat "afile" | mail -s "subject" someone@dest_email.com
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up vote 2 down vote

You need an MTA to send mail. For this, use postfix:

sudo apt-get install postfix

To send email:

echo "test message" | mailx -s 'test subject' myemail@mydomain.com

HELP

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up vote 1 down vote

type

sendmail -t receiver@example

then write your email then press Ctrl+D

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up vote 0 down vote

You can try this:

mail name@mailserver.com -s "Attached file" <<EOF                 
Hi

~| uuencode $HOME/filename.txt filename.txt

EOF

It works with GNU Mailutils, check the website for more information.

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