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Accepted
Nick Pierpoint
Asked: 2011-09-10 00:30:21 +0800 CST

How do I send an email through "mail" in Linux for a username containing an ampersand?

  • 772

For a username "A&B"

[abuser@myserver] chfn -f "A&B"
Changing finger information for abuser
Password:
Finger information changed.
[abuser@myserver] mail -s Test [email protected]
Hello World!
Cc:
[abuser@myserver]

When this mail arrives, "&" appears to be replaced by the username in the From field in the email.

From: AAbuserB [abuser@myserver]
linux email sendmail

3 Answers

  1. Try with

    mail -a "From: A&B <abuser@myserver>" -s Test [email protected]
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  2. Try with Quoted Printable Encoding:

    chfn -f "=?ISO-8859-15?Q?A=26B?="

    where =26 is the ampersand. Looks ugly, but should do the trick.

    Edit: It is not mail, but you should then try other alternatives: Use sendmail (the interface of your MTA and not sendmail itself). Or mutt is also good for scripted sending of mails. The mail command is too restricted in functionality in this case. And if you really need a mail command then you need to write a wrapper called mail that internally calls mutt for sending.

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  3. Best Answer

    This behaviour is caused by the Mail Transport Agent (MTA) handling of & characters in the mailbox name in /etc/passwd

    From the passwd man page:

    gcos-field is the user's real name, along with information to pass along in a mail- message heading. (It is called the gcos-field for historical reasons.) An ``&'' (ampersand) in this field stands for the login name (in cases where the login name appears in a user's real name).

    The workaround in this case is to explicitly set the From address in the mail client.

    For example, using mutt (as suggested by @mailq):

    ~/.muttrc

set realname="A&B"
set from="ab@myserver"
set use_from=yes

    Sending a test email...

    echo "Test body" | mutt -s "Test" [email protected]

    Seems to work fine.

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