CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashemail
Matthai
Matthai

Reputation: 21

Sending HTML mail with attachment with mailutils

I am trying to send mail from command line on Raspbian Jessie 8.0 on Raspberry Pi 3. I am using mail (mail (GNU Mailutils) 2.99.98), which is a part of mailutils (sudo apt-get install mailutils)

I am trying to send an attachment in HTML mail with some special Slovenian characters:

echo "Hi,<br>this is mail body with special slovenian characters: <b>ČŠŽ</b>." | mail -s "$(echo -e "Test subject\nContent-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\nContent-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable")" -A attachment.jpg [email protected]

The problem is, the received mail contains an attachment, but is not in HTML and special characters are not right encoded.

If I try to send the mail without -A parameter it goes through just fine.

What could be a problem?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 957

Answers (2)

Carlos Cid
Carlos Cid

Reputation: 21

I found that mail.mailutils version 3.1.1 if you use the option --attach, will always consider the body of the message as plain/text content type. Even if you try to set a different Content-Type header, mail.mailutils inserts a Content-Type: text/plain header that takes precedence.

So my approach was to build the entire e-mail as a multipart e-mail (like in the 90s).

Sample code to send a HTML message plus a CSV attachment:

#!/bin/bash

BOUNDARY="1643879608-342111580=:74189"
tmpfile=$(tempfile)

# First part - HTML content
echo "--${BOUNDARY}" >> ${tmpfile}
echo "Content-ID: <$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S.%N").0@$(hostname)>" >> ${tmpfile}
echo -e "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\n" >> ${tmpfile}

cat my_html_content.html >> ${tmpfile}

# Second part - CSV attachment
echo "--${BOUNDARY}" >> ${tmpfile}
echo "Content-ID: <$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S.%N").1@$(hostname)>" >> ${tmpfile}
echo "Content-Type: text/csv; name=my_csv_attachment.csv" >> ${tmpfile}
echo "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64" >> ${tmpfile}
echo -e "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=my_csv_attachment.csv\n" >> ${tmpfile}

base64 my_csv_attachment.csv >> ${tmpfile}

# No more parts
echo "--${BOUNDARY}--" >> ${tmpfile}

mail --subject="My subject" \
     --append="Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"${BOUNDARY}\"" \
     [email protected] < ${tmpfile}

rm -f ${tmpfile}

Upvotes: 2

PascalVKooten
PascalVKooten

Reputation: 21453

Try yagmail -- a python package. Github: https://github.com/kootenpv/yagmail/. It is not only easy to include the functionality in a python script and run it, but it also accommodates a subset of the features on the CLI.

pip install yagmail

Then:

yagmail -u [email protected] 
        -p password 
        -s My Subject 
        -c "Hi,\nthis is mail body with slovenian characters: <b>ČŠŽ</b>." 
           "attachment.jpg"

One liner:

yagmail -u [email protected] -p password -s My Subject -c "Hi,\nthis is mail body with slovenian characters: <b>ČŠŽ</b>." "attachment.jpg"

In contents -c, if you put a filename it will be attached. Emails will automatically be sent as HTML emails when possible.

Upvotes: 0

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