84

mail -s "subject" [email protected] <test.html works, but only for plain text email.

What is the correct way to send HTML email using the Linux command mail?

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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asked Jun 22, 2011 at 4:15
1
  • The scripts here are fine for simple English text with short lines, but proper MIME support requires you to handle non-ASCII character sets and arbitrarily long lines by wrapping them properly. In short, you can assemble a valid MIME structure with echo and cat, but for many real-world scenarios, you really really don't want to. Commented Nov 3, 2022 at 12:35

9 Answers 9

77

There are many different versions of mail around. When you go beyond mail -s subject to1@address1 to2@address2 <body (for sending, that's all POSIX guarantees — and even -s didn't exist in the old days), they tend to have different command line options. Adding an additional header isn't always easy.

  • With some mailx implementations, e.g. from mailutils on Ubuntu or Debian's bsd-mailx, it's easy, because there's an option for that.

    mailx -a 'Content-Type: text/html' -s "Subject" to@address <test.html

  • With the Heirloom mailx, there's no convenient way. One possibility to insert arbitrary headers is to set editheaders=1 and use an external editor (which can be a script).

    ## Prepare a temporary script that will serve as an editor.
## This script will be passed to ed.
temp_script=$(mktemp)
cat <<'EOF' >>"$temp_script"
1a
Content-Type: text/html
.
$r test.html
w
q
EOF
## Call mailx, and tell it to invoke the editor script
EDITOR="ed -s $temp_script" heirloom-mailx -S editheaders=1 -s "Subject" to@address <<EOF
~e
.
EOF
rm -f "$temp_script"

  • With a general POSIX mailx, I don't know how to get at headers.

If you're going to use any mail or mailx, keep in mind that

  • This isn't portable even within a given Linux distribution. For example, both Ubuntu and Debian have several alternatives for mail and mailx.
  • When composing a message, mail and mailx treats lines beginning with ~ as commands. If you pipe text into mail, you need to arrange for this text not to contain lines beginning with ~.

If you're going to install software anyway, you might as well install something more predictable than mail/Mail/mailx. For example, mutt. With Mutt, you can supply most headers in the input with the -H option, but not Content-Type, which needs to be set via a mutt option.

mutt -e 'set content_type=text/html' -s 'hello' 'to@address' <test.html

Or you can invoke sendmail directly. There are several versions of sendmail out there, but they all support sendmail -t to send a mail in the simplest fashion, reading the list of recipients from the mail. (I think they don't all support Bcc:.) On most systems, sendmail isn't in the usual $PATH, it's in /usr/sbin or /usr/lib.

cat <<'EOF' - test.html | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
To: to@address
Subject: hello
Content-Type: text/html
EOF
answered Jun 22, 2011 at 23:03
5
  • Tried using the mutt example above; substituting real values for the filename, to email address, etc. but got "No recipients were specified" I'm very new to mutt, @Gilles do you know why that might have happened? (osx mountain lion, mutt 1.5.21 installed via homebrew) Commented Jul 15, 2013 at 16:58
  • my second line was "To: [email protected]" (sorry for lack of formatting, not possible in a response, actual text was sans quotes) and I included a blank line before putting in the EOF. would there be configuration I need to do to mutt? prior to trying the example you gave (with proper values substituted) all I did was 'brew install mutt' Commented Jul 15, 2013 at 19:10
  • @ChuckvanderLinden Ask a new question. Copy-paste the exact command you ran and the full error message. See if you can send an email from mutt using the interactive interface. Commented Jul 15, 2013 at 19:15
  • I was able to send something via the 'interactive' interface, it initially complained about a mail directory missing and offered to create it. reminded how much I hate vim ;-) but got it to send. I'll start a new question as that is easier to format etc. The exact error message was just what I said "No recipients were specified." Commented Jul 15, 2013 at 19:45
  • New question unix.stackexchange.com/questions/83137/… Commented Jul 15, 2013 at 20:06
16 
#!/bin/sh
(
echo "To: [email protected]"
echo "Subject: hello"
echo "Content-Type: text/html"
echo
echo "<html><b><font size='7'>H</font>ello</b></html>"
echo
) | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
answered Oct 17, 2012 at 18:47
4
  • 7
    That doesn't acually use mail. Commented Oct 17, 2012 at 19:09
  • 4
    @user16144 No, but it's a nice alternative that the OP might like to consider. Commented Feb 12, 2014 at 3:24
  • Yes, it does not use mail but it works everywhere I have tried it which is more than I can say for the other solutions. Commented May 3, 2018 at 16:21
  • Works beautifully on Mac as well. Commented Feb 28, 2019 at 20:41
7

With the Heirloom mailx, convenient way is

mailx -s "$(echo -e "Newsletter issue 3\nContent-Type: text/html")" [email protected] < /tmp/htmlmail.txt

Thanks, Dude
Tested on Fedora 17, and worked

answered Jul 29, 2014 at 13:01
2
  • 1
    Cheeky. I like it. :-] Commented Nov 16, 2016 at 16:29
  • 3
    Beware that this solution may lead to the email having both "Content-Type: text/html" and "Content-Type: text/plain", and potential inconsistencies if you use this way to specify charset. Commented Mar 16, 2017 at 15:45
4

You will have to add Content-Type header to your email to make this happen. 

echo "<html><b>Hello</b></html>" | mail -a "Content-type: text/html;" -s "Testing" [email protected]

will work

answered Jun 22, 2011 at 6:39
7
  • 3
    mail: illegal option -- a Commented Jun 22, 2011 at 6:56
  • Do you have mailx? That might have the option. If that doesn't work. If that doesn't work, you can consider using mutt although I don't know off hand what the command line switches to do it are. Commented Jun 22, 2011 at 7:04
  • 1
    if mail isn't cutting the mustard, use python ... docs.python.org/library/email-examples.html examples is the 3rd one or #6 which suits your requirement. Commented Jun 22, 2011 at 8:40
  • Python will require you to write (and maintain) a script. A command line one liner has different advantages. Commented Jun 22, 2011 at 11:04
  • I have mailx,but "option -a" don't work,still show:mail: illegal option -- a Commented Jun 27, 2011 at 1:17
3

With heirloom-mailx you can change sendmail program to your hook script, replace headers there and then use sendmail.

The script I use (~/bin/sendmail-mailx-hook):

#!/bin/bash
sed '1,/^$/{
s,^\(Content-Type: \).*,ドル1円text/html; charset=utf-8,g
s,^\(Content-Transfer-Encoding: \).*,ドル18円bit,g
}' | sendmail $@

This script changes the values in the mail header as follows:

  • Content-Type: to text/html; charset=utf-8
  • Content-Transfer-Encoding: to 8bit (not sure if this is really needed).

To send HTML email:

mailx -Ssendmail='~/bin/sendmail-mailx-hook' -s "subject" [email protected] < test.html

This method is more effective than proposed by @Gilles because it does not create temporary files and just fix the stream on-the-fly.

answered Sep 17, 2014 at 6:47
2

I have used the below scripts to happen

#!/bin/ksh
(
echo "To: [email protected]"
echo "Subject: Job Status"
echo "Content-Type: text/html"
echo
echo "<html>
<head>
<title>Status of the jobs during the day</title>
<style>
table, th, td {
 border: 1px solid blue;
 border-collapse: collapse;
}
th, td {
 padding: 5px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table style='width:100%'>
<tr bgcolor='#808080'>
 <th>Job Name</th>
 <th>System name</th>
 <th>Status</th>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Job-1</td>
 <td>Sys</td>
 <td>Sucess</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Job-2</td>
 <td>sys</td>
 <td>Failure</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Job-3</td>
 <td>sys</td>
 <td>Sucess</td>
 </tr>
 </table>
</body></html>"
echo
) | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
don_crissti
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answered Jun 27, 2016 at 14:00
1
  • Nothing here is specific to ksh; you could change the shebang to #!/bin/sh. The path to sendmail differs between platforms; probably take it out and rely on your PATH instead (and/or check in /usr/libexec and some other peculiar places). Commented Nov 3, 2022 at 12:31
0

For me i needed to specify a variable such as SMTP server, so the mail command worked in the below fashion. I searched across many posts, and i found below property to convert the body into text/html. Now the email i receive is in the HTML format.

Content-Disposition: inline

Unix version: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.6 (Santiago)

First. Create whatever information is needed into a script (testSql.sh)

echo "<html><body><pre>"
mysql -u USERNAME -pPASSWORD -P PORTNUMBER -h HOSTNAME DBNAME --table -e "select columns from tablename where member in ('value1','value2')"
echo "</pre></body></html>"

Second. Pipe that script to the mail command

./testSql.sh | mail -v -S smtp=smtp://IP:PORTNUMBER -s "$(echo -e "This is the subject\nContent-Type: text/ht ml\nMIME-Version: 1.0\nContent-Disposition: inline")" [email protected]

By doing this i get information as below in the email:

Content-Disposition: inline Message-ID: User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.4 7/29/08 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 
Value1 Value2

Value1 and Value2 as per the HTML tagging done in the testSql.sh

Anthon
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answered Jun 22, 2015 at 11:26
1
  • i needed \r\n on my Centos-8 Commented Jan 12, 2021 at 15:49
0

Posted in another thread but basically on our version of mail/mailx(12.5+) the -a parameter for mail doesn't work anymore since it adds an attachment and I couldn't find any replacement parameter for additional headers so the easiest way for me was to use sendmail.

Below is a simple 1 liner I created to run in our bash script that works for us. It just basically passes the Content-Type: text/html, subject, and the body and works.

printf "Content-Type: text/html\nSubject: Test Email\nHTML BODY<b>test bold</b>" | sendmail <Email Address To>

If you wanted to create an entire html page from a variable an alternative method I used in the bash script was to pass the variable as below.

emailBody="From: <Email Address From>
Subject: Test
Content-Type: text/html; charset=\"us-ascii\"
<html>
<body>
body
<b> test bold</b>
</body>
</html>
"
echo "$emailBody" | sendmail <Email Address To>
answered Nov 21, 2019 at 15:57
-5 
cat htmlfile.html | mail -s "subject" [email protected]
answered Jun 22, 2011 at 5:07
1
  • 5
    Nope. This will send a text email with HTML in the body. Commented Jun 22, 2011 at 6:35

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