Send mail from script

giskard22

12-22-2005, 12:12 PM

How do you send email messages from a shell script? I thought it was something like:

echo "text" | mail -s subject my@email.address

When I do that, no messages show up (and I get no feedback).

I found this old page (http://www.matisse.net/OSX/intro_unix/05g_Sending_Email.html) which claims you have to change the default sendmail configuration before this works. Do you still have to do this? Are there newer instructions for 10.4?

jbc

12-22-2005, 12:47 PM

Afaik, yes, you need Mail Transfer Agent running on your machine in order to send mail from the command line. This could be the default Postfix installation, or it could be any MTA you care to install (fink or darwinports are handy for this).

If you need more options than the mail command provides, you can install an alternate command-line mailer or a command-line mail client. I have exim + mutt set up on my system, and they allow me to automate creating and sending fairly complex emails (with attachments) via shell scripts quite nicely.

It may be possible to set up an email client like mutt to send mail without an MTA installed; I'm not sure, I've never tried it!

giskard22

12-22-2005, 02:57 PM

Thanks. I'm doing this on 10.4 Server, so I just enabled SMTP and started Mail service. That seemed to make everything work.

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