CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unix
par181
par181

Reputation: 401

Attachment in html formatted mail in unix

1. (cat mytest.html;uuencode "myfile.xls" "myfile.xls")|mail -s "$("This is Subject\nContent-Type: text/html")" [email protected]

2. (uuencode "myfile.xls" "myfile.xls")|mail -s "$("This is Subject\nContent-Type: text/html")" [email protected] < mytest.html

When I am using above 2 methods, output is coming with html formatted. But I am not getting any attachment?(Where mytest.html contains the html part)

Note: I am getting some scattered character in place of attachment.

Please get me out of here

Upvotes: 0

Views: 676

Answers (1)

Celada
Celada

Reputation: 22261

uuencode was an old standard for encoding binary data as ASCII text for inclusion in mail and news articles but it has been obsolete and not in common use for more than a decade. There are probably no remaining MUAs that still know how to process it, especially in HTML mail.

Also, your trick of specifying the Content-Type header to the -s argument of the mail command is a very ugly hack. I'm surprised it works at all! In any case, it fails to include at least one other required header: MIME-Version: 1.0.

You need to build a MIME multipart message with one part being your HTML document, and the other part being your attachment (probably base64 encoded if it's binary data).

Because MIME requires you to choose a multipart boundary, format the body of the mail to delimit the multiple parts using that boundary, generate headers for each of the multipart subparts (including each part's own Content-Type and possibly Content-Transfer-Encoding and Content-Disposition or others), and encode each part appropriately, you're much better off using a toolkit that constructs MIME messages for you rather than trying to do it manually through the mail command. If you are working in the shell, you might try makemime but that's almost as ugly as doing it manually so I'd suggest using something like Perl's MIME-Tools.

Upvotes: 1

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