Mail from Linux/Shell

[mediator]

Hi,

 

 I need to send a mail from Linux box/bash with the following paramaters.

 

1. Mail from

2. Recipients

3. Mail server IP

4. Subject

 

Please help me how to do this.

[Karl L.]

There is a standard utility simply called mail that is installed by default on most Linux and UNIX systems. You can find a basic tutorial for it here. If you need more functionality than the basics covered in that tutorial, mail is very well documented in its man page.

[mediator]

  On 05/08/2013 at 17:17, xorangekiller said:

There is a standard utility simply called mail that is installed by default on most Linux and UNIX systems. You can find a basic tutorial for it here. If you need more functionality than the basics covered in that tutorial, mail is very well documented in its man page.

 

Hi, I have already done that. But I need a utility which can pass a parameter like "from" and "smtp server ip" and execute it from commandline itself. I have mail, mailx, sendmail installed by default. I have the vbs script for this which uses "from, to, server_IP". But I need to make either a shell script or a simple command for the same.

[ichi]

I might be wrong but I don't think you can pass FROM as parameter to sendmail, postfix or the likes.

 

There's a quirky way to do that, telneting to your local mail server on port 25 and manually forging the email:

HELO yourdomain
MAIL FROM:youraddress@yourdomain
RCPT TO:someone@somewhere
DATA
Subject: this is so awkward Stallman would be proud
blahblah
whateverwhatever
.
QUIT

You could then spawn a non interactive telnet session from your script with all the mail parameters.

 

Again, quirky, but works.

[+Majesticmerc MVC]

  On 06/08/2013 at 11:10, ichi said:

I might be wrong but I don't think you can pass FROM as parameter to sendmail, postfix or the likes.

 

There's a quirky way to do that, telneting to your local mail server on port 25 and manually forging the email:

HELO yourdomain
MAIL FROM:youraddress@yourdomain
RCPT TO:someone@somewhere
DATA
Subject: this is so awkward Stallman would be proud
blahblah
whateverwhatever
.
QUIT

You could then spawn a non interactive telnet session from your script with all the mail parameters.

 

Again, quirky, but works.

 

In the past I've done something similar. Some distros allow you to open sockets within the shell (Redhat does, Debian doesn't AFAIK), so you can open a socket on port 25 and then redirect output into the "file" that gets created.

 

This is code similar to what I've done in the past. (Untested so it might be bugridden)...

 

 

#! /bin/bash

mail_server="smtp.something.com"
sender="test@test.com"
recipient="someone.else@test.com"
message="Hello, world!"

if ! exec 5<>"/dev/tcp/${mail_server}/25"; then
    echo "Could not open socket on port 25 to send email." >&2
    exit 1
else
    _response_code=""
    _message=""

    # Check socket open return code.
    read -u 5 _response_code _message
    if ! [ "${_response_code}" != "220" ]; then
        echo "Unable to send email to SMTP host. Reason: ${_message}." >&2
        exit 1
    fi

    # Build the email header.
    local _message_header=(
        "HELO"
        "MAIL FROM:<${sender}>"
        "RCPT TO:<${recipient}>"
    )

    # Send the header text.
    for _header in "${_message_header[@]}"; do
        echo -e "${_header}\r" >&5
        read -u 5 _response_code _message
        if [ "220" != "${_response_code}" ]; then
            echo "Unable to send email to SMTP host. Reason: ${_message}." >&2
            exit 1
        fi
    done

    # Signal start of message content.
    echo -e "DATA\r" >&5

    read -u 5 _response_code _message
    if [ "${_response_code}" != "354" ]; then
        echo "Unable to send email to SMTP host. Reason: ${_message}." >&2
        exit 1
    fi

    echo -e "${message}\r" >&5

    # Signal end of message
    echo -e "\r\n.\r" >&5
    read -u 5 _response_code _message

    if [ "220" != "${_response_code}" ]; then
        echo "Unable to send email to SMTP host. Reason: ${_message}." >&2
        exit 1
    fi

    echo "QUIT\r" >&5

    echo "Email sent!"

fi

[Max Norris]

Python's an easy option too if you want do make your own script, only takes a couple lines of code via smtplib, many distros have it installed by default and super easy to get if not. You mentioned VBScript so you should be able to figure this out rather quickly. An off the cuff example... It might even work, I'm just making this up, haven't tested it, but you can get the gist of it. If anything set it up to handle command line arguments and symlink it into somewhere in your path so you can access it from anywhere if needed.

 

#!/usr/bin/python

import smtplib

sender = 'whoever@whereever.com'
receivers = ['me@here.com','me@there.com']

message = """From: From Me <whoever@whereever.com>
To: To Me <me@here.com>
Subject: Just testing.

This is just a test from Python.
"""

try:
   smtpObj = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
   smtpObj.sendmail(sender, receivers, message)         
   print "Mail sent ok."
except SMTPException:
   print "Mail not sent."

You can add authentication, encryption and all that if needed. Some more examples on the Python docs site, pretty easy stuff.

http://docs.python.org/2/library/email-examples.html

http://docs.python.org/2/library/smtplib.html

[mediator]

@Ichi - I can do that manually. But I want to know if anyone knows of a working script otherwise it will take me some time make one.

 

@Majesticmerc - Thanx a lot for that script, it looks good. I will try that. :)

 

@MaxNorris - I don't have any experience with python and I don't know if python is installed on the linux box. But I will try that as well. Thanks a lot. :)

 

Anyways, I have found a brilliant perl script which has a lot of options that can be parsed via commandline => http://caspian.dotconf.net/menu/Software/SendEmail/

 

But I would prefer a shell script over perl script for now. Thanks a lot everyone for your time and help. :)