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conorgriffin
Asked: 2010-10-10 16:38:35 +0800 CST

How can I email an attachment from the command line

  • 772

Is it possible to email attachments from the command line?

If possible, I'd like something as simple as:

mail -a myfile.txt -t [email protected] -s "Here's my file"
command-line email files

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Of all the mail user agents in the Ubuntu repository, it appears that mutt is the command-line MUA that is blessed with Long Term Support.

    According to the manual, you can do something exactly like:

    mutt -a myfile.txt -s "Here's my file" -- [email protected]

    except it won't go anywhere since one also needs a Mail Transfer Agent. Popular ones are:

    • the venerable sendmail
    • postfix
    • exim4
    • qmail
    • nullmailer

    and the only ones that Canonical seems to support are postfix (thanks for the correction Steve) and exim4.

    One could also say that xdg-email is also a proper Ubuntu MUA, but it is a bare-bones front end which only executes your preferred MUA on your behalf.

    If you'd like advice on which MTA might be suitable for your use, perhaps open another question here.

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  2. I had bad trouble with sending attachment files, too. When I sent an email without attachment, it was successful but was not with attachment. This problem was existent with sendemail, mutt, mail, mailx , uuencode commands.

    Fortunately, It was solved funnily. I use Gmail for sending email. You can configure your gmail for sending emails via commands in terminal as declared at http://www.linuxandlife.com/2013/01/send-email-from-linux-terminal.html .

    You can send a text email using:

    mail -s "hello" [email protected] < /home/masoud/YOURFILE.txt

    but you can't send same file as attachment as below:

    mail -s "hello" [email protected] -a /home/masoud/YOURFILE.txt

    or:

    mail -s "hello" -a /home/masoud/YOURFILE.txt [email protected]

    Finally, I understood that only this format could send an attachment:

    echo "your message here" | mail -s "title" -a /home/masoud/YOURFILE.txt [email protected]

    Funnily, the difference is existence of the "echo" command.

    Update: 201808

    Seems that the -a option has been changed with Uppercase -A for attachment now. The -a seems to be for changing header according to doc

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  3. I found that the command and parameters have been changed recently.

    If your want to send your attachments with this command:

    mail -s "your subject" [email protected] -A /your/attachment/absolute/path < /home/you/message.txt

    The option attachment should be -A which is CAPITAL A.

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  4. You may want to send a file from the shell, but otherwise use Thunderbird.

    In this case, try thunderbird -remote ... is useful - assuming thunderbird is usually running:

    The command opens a mail compose window of a running thunderbird instance.
    The "From" address is your default address configured in thunderbird.
    Also, the existing account settings are used, there is no separate setup needed.

    For a mail adressed to [email protected], with subject "S", body "B", and an attachment /some/absolute/file.txt, the command is

    thunderbird -remote "xfeDoCommand(composeMessage,subject='S',to='[email protected]',body='B',attachment='/some/absolute/file.txt')"

    There are two problems:

    The attached file needs to be given by an absolute path, which is tedious in practice. That can be handeled by using readlink -f to resolve relative paths: 

    thunderbird -remote "xfeDoCommand(composeMessage,subject='S',to='[email protected]',body='B',attachment='$(readlink -f file.txt)')"

    Also, the command is to long. Use a shell script or shell function, with four arguments:

    thunderbird-compose () {
    thunderbird -remote "xfeDoCommand(composeMessage,subject='$1',to='$2',body='$3',attachment='$(readlink -f $4)')"
}

    With this function, the command becomes readable:

    thunderbird-compose 'Some Subject' [email protected] 'Body of message' file1

    will open a thunderbird "Write" window with the attachment, and From, To, Subject, and body text filled in. It can be edited before sending it.

    • 3

  5. heirloom-mailx package in debian provides mailx command to send mime attachments easily. following works for me;

     mailx -a attachment.zip -s subject [email protected]
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  6. I wish to add another answer which is used to add body text along with the attachment. Cheers!!

    echo "This is the message body" | mutt -a "/path/to/file.to.attach" -s "subject of message" -- [email protected]
    • 0

  7. My version of mail, BSD mail, does not seem to support attachments (it's not mentioned anywhere in the manpage).

    A hacky workaround is to send the attachment as uuencoded stream. Gmail will interpret this as two attachments, one called "noname" which is the uuencoded text and the other called "-" which carries the decoded version that can be opened by any program that recognizes the file type by its binary data. I don't know if this behavior is documented or applies for any other mail client, but if you don't want to install anything this is a quick hack.

    uuencode image.jpg - |  mail -s "Subject line" [email protected]
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