How to send email from Terminal?

181
votes

I know there are ways to send email from terminal in Linux/MacOS, but I can't seem to find proper documentation on how to do that.

Basically I need it for my bash script that notifies me every time there is a change in a file.

7
bashemailterminal
It should probably be noted here that some hosts and ISPs "turn off" the ability for you to send email. I presume it's an attempt to stop people spamming and phishing through them – Jim Jeffries
@JimJeffries Which ones? I am using an Amazon EC2 web server. – ckjbgames

7 Answers

133
votes

Go into Terminal and type man mail for help.

You will need to set SMTP up:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20081217161612647

See also:

http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/09/send-mail-over-your-network.html

Eg:

mail -s "hello" "[email protected]" <<EOF
hello
world
EOF

This will send an email to [email protected] with the subject hello and the message

Hello

World

141
votes
echo "this is the body" | mail -s "this is the subject" "to@address"
43
votes

Probably the simplest way is to use curl for this, there is no need to install any additional packages and it can be configured directly in a request.

Here is an example using gmail smtp server:

curl --url 'smtps://smtp.gmail.com:465' --ssl-reqd \
  --mail-from '[email protected]' \
  --mail-rcpt '[email protected]' \
  --user '[email protected]:YourPassword' \
  -T <(echo -e 'From: [email protected]\nTo: [email protected]\nSubject: Curl Test\n\nHello')
41
votes

If all you need is a subject line (as in an alert message) simply do:

mailx -s "This is all she wrote" < /dev/null "myself@myaddress"
22
votes

If you want to attach a file on Linux

echo 'mail content' | mailx -s 'email subject' -a attachment.txt [email protected]
10
votes

in the terminal on your mac os or linux os type this code

mail -s (subject) (receiversEmailAddress)  <<< "how are you?"

for an example try this

mail -s "hi" [email protected] <<< "how are you?"<br>
2
votes

For SMTP hosts and Gmail I like to use Swaks -> https://easyengine.io/tutorials/mail/swaks-smtp-test-tool/

On a Mac:

  1. brew install swaks
  2. swaks --to [email protected] --server smtp.example.com