Overview
You can send basic email from the command line. That’s been done a million times before, including by me!
Did you know that you can send email from the command line, from your gmail account that you authenticated to? That’s a big deal for some people. This document describes how to do that.
Sending gmail from command line
Install packages msmtp and mutt.
yum install msmtp mutt
Write the conf file and fill in the pertinent information.
# write conf file
tf=/etc/msmtprc
touch "${tf}"; chmod 0600 "${tf}"; chown root:root "${tf}";
cat <<EOF >"${tf}"
account default
tls on
tls_certcheck off
auth on
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
user bgstack15@gmail.com
from bgstack15@gmail.com
password plaintextpassword
#
account second
tls on
tls_certcheck off
auth on
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
user secondaccount@gmail.com
from secondaccount@gmail.com
password plaintextpassword
EOF
Now you can send an email with this command.
echo -e "From: Pretty Name\r\nSubject: Example subject\r\nContent goes here." | msmtp --debug --from=default -t destination@example.com
Sending attachments
Configure mutt if you want to send attachments from the command line.
cat <<EOF >> /etc/Muttrc.local
set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"
set use_from=yes
set realname="Pretty Name"
set from=bgstack15@gmail.com
set envelope_from=yes
EOF
Send an email in html format and with an attachment.
subject="This is the subject
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html"
mutt -a ~/attachment.txt -s "${subject}" -- destination@example.com << EOF
<html><body><pre>
This will be fixed width font. I find it useful for sending code fragments or log files.
</pre></body></html>
EOF
Authenticating to gmail from command line
The Arch Linux wiki provides an important reminder:
Tip: If using Gmail you’ll need to either
- Allow “Less Secure Apps” in Settings > Security. Make sure to sign out of your other Gmail accounts first because the security settings part of Google Accounts can not manage concurrent sessions of more than one account.
- Enable two factor authentication and create an app password.
References
- Send.sh from bgscripts package https://github.com/bgstack15/bgscripts/blob/master/usr/share/bgscripts/send.sh
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Msmtp#Test_functionality
[…] shown how to send authenticated gmail from the command line before. That uses msmtp which takes some configuration. This document shows how to use mailx itself […]