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I recently moved to Ubuntu 14.04 and encounter my first problems. I would like to create a schedule for automatic email transmission. I'm running some queries every morning via cron which are saved as report query.pdf in one specific path.

I would like to send an email afterwards to a specific group of recipients using the preinstalled Thunderbird client. I have already found Send later. However, it doesn't attach thequery.pdf when the content changes every morning.

Is there another way or add-on? I just couldn't find anything at all.

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  • Is scheduling a task with cron an option? E.g. "send a mail X every day at 15.00 PM". Or in other words, is this task to be scheduled at regular time intervals and can we rely on the fact that the system will be up at a certain X time to perform it?
    – kos
    Dec 11, 2015 at 10:27
  • I do schedule tasks with cron. At 08.45 I run R-Scriptwhich generates via knitr and LaTeX a PDF in a specific folder/path. The PDF contains daily Google Analytics Report. I just want to attach that PDF automatically. Send Laterseems to be a good tool but its doesnt attach PDFs each morning. Its just attach the PDF you have chosen beforehand.
    – Mamba
    Dec 11, 2015 at 10:51
  • Yes, the system is always running.
    – Mamba
    Dec 11, 2015 at 10:57
  • How about just chaining a command to send the mail right at the end of the command you already have in the cron job? That should work unless I'm missing something.
    – kos
    Dec 11, 2015 at 11:01
  • 2
    all you need is another cronjob to send email immediately after the genration of pdf file. So I see your cron job is running at 08:45 you can use mutt (mutt -s "email subject" -a /home/me/pdfs/query.pdf [email protected] < /tmp/mail.txt) where mail.txt is the body of email that contains text. So you can put all that in cronjob that will run, say at 08:50 and that will do
    – ostendali
    Dec 11, 2015 at 13:30

1 Answer 1

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+100

Yes, it's possible to install an SMTP send connector on your Microsoft Exchange server and then it's just a question of:

  • configuring sendmail

  • adding the following line to your cron script:

    mutt -s "query report" -a /home/me/pdfs/query.pdf [email protected] < /home/me/mail/query-report-body.txt

    where:

    • -s subject is the subject of the message. (query report in the example above)
    • -a file is the attached report file to your message. (example taken from your comment)
    • [email protected] is the SMTP address of the Exchange group you're sending the mail to.
    • query-report-body.txt is the text file containing the body message of your report.
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    – Fabby
    Dec 13, 2015 at 23:28

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