Home / server / Questions / 420865
Accepted
JM4
Asked: 2012-08-25 07:33:23 +0800 CST

Unix mail -s command hangs without send

  • 772

I know the common command to send email from shell is:

mail -s 'Some Subject' [email protected]

When I do this however, things just hang. No errors returned, no messages sent and seemingly nothing put in the qmail queue. When I try to email my personal email address, the thing just hangs and does not create any entries in the qmail log files.

Are there other things I could be checking to see what the issue might be?

apache-2.2

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It's waiting for you to type in the message body.

    Once you finish typing the message body, you can terminate the entry by either hitting ctrl-D on a new line, or having a "." (a period) as the first character of a new line.

    You will then get a prompt for the "CC" if you want to add any addresses for the CC field.

    After you enter that, or hit ENTER, it will send.

    Example:

    $ mail -s "Test message" [email protected]
This is a test message
.
Cc: 
$

    You can also pass in a message body via stdin, e.g., cat /path/to/file.txt > mail -s "Test Message" [email protected], and the message body will be the contents of file.txt. This works better if file.txt is plaintext.

    • 7