How can I send attachment with ssmtp in Linux?

Question

I can send email from my gmail account by ssmtp in Linux now. But how can I attach files to the email?

score 25 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 03 '18 at 23:03

25

echo -e "to: [email protected]\nsubject: subject\n"| (cat - && uuencode /path/to/attachment attachment.name) | ssmtp [email protected]

This solution does not depend on mutt.

edited Mar 03 '18 at 23:03

d5c0d3

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answered Sep 16 '13 at 13:28

metrix

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How is this getting a negative vote? it solves the problem. – metrix Sep 16 '13 at 14:43
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By the way, SSMTP is used by many people to send automated E-mails through Gmail: http://www.nixtutor.com/linux/send-mail-with-gmail-and-ssmtp/ – metrix Sep 16 '13 at 15:23
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I know this answer came in over a year after the question was asked, but this is the answer to the question. Works great, thanks. – RTF Aug 01 '14 at 19:18
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4 years later, July 2017 - This is the answer I was looking for. Thank you, @metrix! – SDsolar Jul 21 '17 at 05:09
missing uuencode command – Pavel Niedoba Aug 28 '17 at 15:08
See section about cat - && uuencode /path/to/attachment – metrix Aug 28 '17 at 18:59

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 17 '17 at 13:45

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To send an attachment, you need to encode the message using MIME.

You could use Mutt

mutt -s SUBJECT -a ATTACHMENT_FILE_1 ATTACHMENT_FILE_2 -- EMAIL_ADDRESS < MESSAGE_FILE

or mpack

mpack -s SUBJECT -D MESSAGE_FILE ATTACHMENT_FILE EMAIL_ADDRESS

See also:

edited Jul 17 '17 at 13:45

Iwan B.

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answered Jul 26 '12 at 15:13

Mikel

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Thanks. So is that to say that it is NOT possible to send an attachment by ssmtp alone? – deepsky Jul 26 '12 at 15:26
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It's possible, but you'd have to generate all the MIME headers somehow. Why do you need to only use `ssmtp`? If `ssmtp` provides `/usr/lib/sendmail` or `/usr/sbin/sendmail`, any local mail program should be able to send via `ssmtp`. – Mikel Jul 26 '12 at 15:34
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@deepsky ssmtp is not a user interface. It's an MTA (mail transport agent), which is infrastructure meant to be accessed via an MUA (mail user agent, also known as a "mailreader"). It's sort of impressive that you were able to wrangle ssmtp by yourself without an MUA, but it's not a reasonable method of doing things. It's a good network-debugging skill you've learned though! – Alan Curry Jul 27 '12 at 04:47

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 16 '13 at 15:02

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$ echo -e "to: [email protected]\nsubject: test\n"| (cat - && uuencode /path/to/file file.name) | ssmtp [email protected]

Provided that SSMTP is configured, and you've verified that messages without attachments are reaching their destination and does not depend on mutt.

edited Sep 16 '13 at 15:02

metrix

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answered Sep 02 '13 at 02:53

Anon

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I don't think this answers the original question. – slm Sep 02 '13 at 03:10

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 26 '13 at 02:10

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 $ sudo apt-get install uudeview
 $ echo -e "From: [email protected]\nTo: [email protected]\nSubject: mySubject\n\nBody-Text"|uuenview -a -bo MyAttachment|sendmail -t

answered Dec 26 '13 at 02:10

Michi

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 20 '21 at 06:25

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another alternative to uuencode is to use base64 commend instead ->

cat msg_source.txt | (cat - base64 && attachment.bin) | ssmtp -vvvv [email protected]

where msg_source.txt contains header tags, like To:, From:, Subject:, Content-Type:, etc

answered Feb 20 '21 at 06:25

Zonder

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How can I send attachment with ssmtp in Linux?

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