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3

mail -s "subject" [email protected] <test.html works, but only for plain text email.

What is the correct way to send HTML email using the Linux command mail?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 22 '11 at 6:21

4 Answers

up vote -5 down vote 
cat htmlfile.html | mail -s "subject" [email protected]
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3  
Nope. This will send a text email with HTML in the body. – Noufal Ibrahim Jun 22 '11 at 6:35
up vote 4 down vote

You will have to add Content-Type header to your email to make this happen. 

echo "<html><b>Hello</b></html>" | mail -a "Content-type: text/html;" -s "Testing" [email protected]

will work

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mail: illegal option -- a – pyth0ner Jun 22 '11 at 6:56
Do you have mailx? That might have the option. If that doesn't work. If that doesn't work, you can consider using mutt although I don't know off hand what the command line switches to do it are. – Noufal Ibrahim Jun 22 '11 at 7:04
1  
if mail isn't cutting the mustard, use python ... docs.python.org/library/email-examples.html examples is the 3rd one or #6 which suits your requirement. – sdolgy Jun 22 '11 at 8:40
Python will require you to write (and maintain) a script. A command line one liner has different advantages. – Noufal Ibrahim Jun 22 '11 at 11:04
I have mailx,but "option -a" don't work,still show:mail: illegal option -- a – pyth0ner Jun 27 '11 at 1:17
up vote 14 down vote

There are many different versions of mail around. When you go beyond mail -s subject to1@address1 to2@address2 <body (for sending, that's all POSIX guarantees — and even -s didn't exist in the old days), they tend to have different command line options. Adding an additional header isn't always easy.

  • With some mailx implementations, e.g. from mailutils on Ubuntu or Debian's bsd-mailx, it's easy, because there's an option for that.

    mailx -a 'Content-Type: text/html' -s "Subject" to@address <test.html

  • With the Heirloom mailx, there's no convenient way. One possibility to insert arbitrary headers is to set editheaders=1 and use an external editor (which can be a script).

    ## Prepare a temporary script that will serve as an editor.
## This script will be passed to ed.
temp_script=$(mktemp)
cat <<'EOF' >>"$temp_script"
1a
Content-Type: text/html
.
$r test.html
w
q
EOF
## Call mailx, and tell it to invoke the editor script
EDITOR="ed -s $temp_script" heirloom-mailx -S editheaders=1 -s "Subject" to@address <<EOF
~e
.
EOF
rm -f "$temp_script"

  • With a general POSIX mailx, I don't know how to get at headers.

If you're going to use any mail or mailx, keep in mind that

  • This isn't portable even within a given Linux distribution. For example, both Ubuntu and Debian have several alternatives for mail and mailx.
  • When composing a message, mail and mailx treats lines beginning with ~ as commands. If you pipe text into mail, you need to arrange for this text not to contain lines beginning with ~.

If you're going to install software anyway, you might as well install something more predictable than mail/Mail/mailx. For example, mutt.

cat <<'EOF' test.html | mutt -H -
To: to@address
Subject: hello
Content-Type: text/html

EOF

Or you can invoke sendmail directly. There are several versions of sendmail out there, but they all support sendmail -t to send a mail in the simplest fashion, reading the list of recipients from the mail. (I think they don't all support Bcc:.) On most systems, sendmail isn't in the usual $PATH, it's in /usr/sbin or /usr/lib.

cat <<'EOF' test.html | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
To: to@address
Subject: hello
Content-Type: text/html

EOF
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+1. Wonderfully detailed. – Noufal Ibrahim Jun 23 '11 at 15:20
up vote 0 down vote 
#!/bin/sh

(
echo "To: [email protected]"
echo "Subject: hello"
echo "Content-Type: text/html"
echo
echo "<html><b><font size='7'>H</font>ello</b></html>"
echo
) | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
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3  
That doesn't acually use mail. – user16144 Oct 17 '12 at 19:09

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