Is there a quick and dirty utility to send emails (does not need to be part of a package to receive and view email, in fact, I'd prefer if it wasn't).
Ideally I would like to be able to send attachments as well.
Mike
---------- Post updated at 04:29 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:22 PM ----------
OK I am shocked this actually works! I am almost there. I need to "wrap" the base64 in something so the mail client recognizes it.
( echo "MAIL FROM: xxxxx@yyyyy.com"
sleep 1
echo "RCPT TO: zzzzz@yyyyy.com"
sleep 1
echo "DATA" #thank goodness it seems to receive DATA fast!
echo "Subject: Test email"
echo #requires two new lines for subject
echo "This is a test"
echo
cat filename | base64
echo "." #end of DATA character
sleep 1
echo "QUIT" ) | telnet smtp.yyyyy.com 25
---------- Post updated at 04:59 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:29 PM ----------
Getting closer although the mail is still plain text.
Have you got the mail or sendmail commands available? You can feed these with input files. Have a read of the manual pages. There are configuration files to edit to get them to relay the mail correctly, but that should be pretty easy and it would make your code much simpler.
Usually, sending email from the prompt involves using a mail-transport-agent like sendmail or mailx. If you don't have one, setting up your own mail server isn't exactly "lean", so I might suggest installing ssmtpd instead -- a "stub" MTA which just forwards to whatever real mail server you configure it to.
OK. I got it! Works great. Had to read some RFC documents. Got a clue where to start from a mention of RFC 2822 in a rejection message and from there I found the RFCs for MIME.
{ echo "MAIL FROM: me@yyyy.com"
sleep 1
echo "RCPT TO: you@xxxx.com"
sleep 1
echo "DATA"
sleep 1
echo "Subject: Test email" # some sources say extra line after subject but it breaks MIME for some reason.
echo "From: Me <me@yyyy.com>" # gmail will reject email without additional From: header
echo "MIME-Version: 1.0"
echo "Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"XXXXboundary text\""
echo
echo "This is a multipart message in MIME format."
echo "If you can read this you need a newer mail client or you need to stop playing with your time machine."
echo "RmVsbG93IE1hbW1hbHM6IFdlIHN0cmlrZSB0aGUgRGlub3NhdXJzIGF0IGRhd24uICBMb25nIGxpdmUgdGhlIGV2b2x1dGlvbiEK"
echo
echo "--XXXXboundary text"
echo "Content-Type: text/plain"
echo
echo "this is the body text"
echo
echo "--XXXXboundary text"
echo "Content-Type: text/csv; name=\"thing.csv\""
echo "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64"
echo "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"thing.csv\""
echo
base64 <myfile.csv
echo
echo "--XXXXboundary text--"
echo "."
sleep 1
echo "QUIT"; } | telnet smtp.yyyy.com 25
Sending mail with attachments from a minimal linux system with no mail client!
Well done for persevering with this and thanks for updating the thread too.
I've proved it works on RHEL 6 too. We have some servers where we don't want to allow mail for users to work, but we still need to get alerts out. Just installed the telnet client and it fired up. I had to increase the sleep counts and send a HELO first, but that may just be my relay server requirements. :rolleyes:
I should say HELO or EHLO and will add that. I should also add Date: to the extended headers (beginning of the body) under RFC 2822. In addition recipients are assumed to be bcc (by my server?). Those that should be To, CC, and BCC need to be spelled out in the extended header as well. BCC is frounded on by my employer so I'm going to add some code.
In doing more reseach it appears that subject is usually the last line of the extended header and that a blank line separates the extended header from the true "body" which is why many sources say you need a blank line after subject.
For this type of script I would use expect. If you're connecting to an email host that either not too close or, has a bad connection. The sleep statements might not work to well.
Using autoexpect to create the skeleton for communications with the email server would ensure that you wait for a response. It's also very configurable as far as what you can do if the server doesn't respond as expected. I. E. the mail server responds that your recipient doesn't exist, etc...
Here's a the script autoexpect generated from a command line connection. Note that the scripts generally work route off the hop. Some "massaging" needs to be done. Also, I remove almost ALL the -exact to take into account variations on responses.
