Mutt for html body and multiple html & pdf attachments

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hi all:

Been racking my brain on this for the last couple of days and what has been most frustrating is that this is the last piece I need to complete a project.

There are numerous posts discussing mutt in this forum and others but I have been unable to find similar issues.

Running with RHEL 5.5, mutt 1.4.2.2i, perl 5.8.8

The issue is sending emails from command line using mutt. These emails can have 0 attachments to 5 attachments that can be a mix of html and/or pdf. Sending an email with html body/no attachments was simple;

system("/usr/bin/mutt -s \"Support\" -- \"$cust\" < $body");

Works, no problems.

When the -a options are included for the attachments I am still able to have the mail sent and it is received with an html body but the attachments become in line with the body making them unusable. If I add the

then the attachments are received fine but the body is plain text with all of the html markups in view.

I can add the

on the command line or in .muttrc, same effect. An example of the CLI;

system("/usr/bin/mutt -e \"my_hdr Content-Type:text/html\" -s \"Support\" @attach -- \"$cust\" < $body");

.

How can I do this? It seems like I need the

off for the body of the email and then to turn it on for the attachments.

I was using MIME::Lite in a perl-cgi script but when the pdf attachments wouldn't work I was able to track it down to the

. There are numerous problems with pdf attachments originating from perl-cgi using the MIME::Lite module, mainly they would arrive in a corrupted state and not properly decoded making them unusable. The html attachments were fine.

If at all possible I want to avoid having to install another package. My feeling is that I will encounter similar issues other clients like mpack. Plus they are not installed and there are many hoops to jump through to get them installed.

Many thanks!

2

You need to supply the content type like below, this is a simple example of how it works for me in a perl script:

$mail_type='set content_type="text/html"'

$child_pid = open( MUTT,"|mutt -e ${mail_type} -e ${replyto_name} -e ${replyto_email_address} " .
                        "-s ${subject} -a ${attachment} ${emailrecip}" );
if ( not defined( $child_pid  ) ) {
  print "**Error: Could not open pipe to mutt -- additional error text\n";
  writelog ("ERR Could not open pipe to mutt -- additional error text");
  return 1;
}
# The $message variable has the embedded html
print MUTT $message;
unless (close MUTT) {
  print "**Error: Could not close pipe to mutt -- additional error text\n";
  writelog ("ERR Could not close pipe to mutt -- additional error text");
  return 1;
}

hth