I am trying to use the mailx command for sending email with attachment (zipped) and am facing two issues, below is the command I use:
(echo "$BODY"; UUENCODE $ZIP_FILE $ZIP_FILE) \
| mailx -s $SUBJECT_1 -r " " $SENDER $RECIPIENT
My email subject contains space and Japanese characters.
The variable $SUBJECT_1 has the following statement
Subject: [Budget] Subtype Error and some JAPANESE CHARECTERS
I get bet following error:
contains invalid character '\203'
Moreover for testing purpose I changed the statement of SUBJECT_1 to Test Message
SUBJECT_1="Test Message"
It worked, but I receive only Test instead of Test Message and in the mail I could see two more email ids in the To like Message#domain.com and -r#domain.com
I have not implemented the mail body yet, once subject issue fixed will implement the same in body because Body will also have Japanese characters.
Please help me with this error, how to resolve and what am i doing wrong
There's a list of things you need help with here, more than I want to to handle exhaustively on a sunny Saturday afternoon. But some hints.
Quote your variables.
"$SUBJECT_1" is a single string, whereas $SUBJECT_1 is a list of space-separated words. The second word is your email recipient, and subsequent options are also recipients.
Subject.
The basic idea is that you need to include encoding data in the subject, because email headers are only supposed to include 7-bit ASCII.
Here is a hint at how you put special characters in your Subject line.
Here is another hint.
Here is the RFC that describes in lurid detail what you need to do. Asking your favourite search engine for information about "utf8 email subject" and "rfc1522" is probably a good idea.
Email client.
Finally, rather than learning how to use MIME, consider using mutt instead of mailx to send your mail. Mutt has a -a option to add attachments, making it WAY easier than constructing your own headers and body, which I'm not even sure you'd be able to do with mailx in the first place.
Related
I want to send an email from Linux with body and attachment. However, it only sends either one of the two. When I have both in the command, only the attachment is sent. I'm working with a log file as body and a CSV file as an attachment. I have tried the following;
mail -a "FROM: Name <name#email.com>" -s "subject of email" "recipient#email.com" -A /home/Export/attachment.csv <<< "$BODY_SUCCES"
For which the variable $BODY_SUCCESS is a log file. I have also tried making it work with mutt and mailx, but neither seemed to work, unfortunately. I can't figure out what's going wrong here. Can anyone help?
Have a program that issues the following command at the linux level
EXE1= "SH -c '/usr/lib/sendmail ":EMAIL<1,X>:' < "/thisdata/level1/VRE/&HOLD&/':PC.FILE:'.CSV':'"':"'"
Is it possible to attach a second PC.File in this instruction?
The rightest answer to this would require knowledge of OS and any mail server restrictions you might have but I have been working on an old routine of ours that maybe provide some insight.
We used to us uuencode as #RedCabbage suggested but we had problems with some servers rejecting the messages. As we have no control over other people's servers and because uuencode is almost as old as dirt we updated our solution to use MIME instead. See "Not As Easy Way"
Easy way
On our Linux system we use mailx (which in our case linked to /usr/bin/mail) to add multiple attachments.
echo "It's Wednessday, my dudes." |mail -s "foobar" -a foo.txt -a bar.txt dudes#wednessday.com
This results in an email with two attachments and message body if the files are properly pathed (if used with a real address).
Not As Easy Way
Create your own MIME (multipart/mixed) message. We create a record similar to this.
To: foo#foo.bar
From: bar#foo.bar
Subject: Not Rocket Surgery
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="SomelongBoundryMarkerYouMakeUpDoNotUseThis"
This is a multipart message in MIME format.
--SomelongBoundryMarkerYouMakeUpDoNotUseThis
Content-Type: text/plain
The body of that message go here.
--SomelongBoundryMarkerYouMakeUpDoNotUseThis
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="YourFileName.pdf"
Content-Base: http://www.IputOurDomainHereDunnoWhyDoNotUseThis.com
##BASE64 encoded string go here.
--SomelongBoundryMarkerYouMakeUpDoNotUseThis
Rinse and Repeat with more files, newlines are important here.
For the encoding part, assuming that your file is in /foo/bar.pdf
ENCODED = ""
FILE.LOC = "/foo/bar.pdf"
TEST = ENCODE("Base64",1,FILE.LOC,2,ENCODED,1)
IF TEST EQ 0 THEN
;*Put the text in ENCODED where it says ##BASE64 encoded string go here
END
This is much more tedious because you have to figure out the all the mime types and make sure everything is formatted just right.
Good Luck
This is how we have managed multiple attachments. For example, /home/jbloggs/attachment1.doc /home/jbloggs/attachment2.pdf.
You will (as you have done) have to build the commands and execute them with SH -c 'blah' (as you have done already.)
Create a text file with the address, subject and body in (for example) /home/jbloggs/tempemail.txt
To: recipient.email#gmail.com
subject: Your subject line here
This is the main body text
Cycle through the attachments and uuencode them to an incrementing name (ENCODEDn here):
uuencode /home/jbloggs/attachment1.doc attachment1.doc > ENCODED1
uuencode /home/jbloggs/attachment2.pdf attachment2.pdf > ENCODED2
Use cat to join all the files together to a single one:
cat /home/jbloggs/tempemail.txt ENCODED1 ENCODED2 > COMBOFILE
Use sendmail on the combo:
sendmail recipient.email#gmail.com < COMBOFILE
You can loop through as many ENCODEDn files as you like.
Is it possible to read the emails based on the Subject line and then get the base64 attachment or directly get the attachment ?
Server : Linux System
Your question seems to presuppose that there is a single attachment and that it can be reliably extracted. In the general case, an email message can have a basically infinite amount of attachments, and the encoding could be one out of several.
But if we assume that you are dealing with a single sender which consistently uses a static message template where the first base64 attachment is always going to be the one you want, something like
case $(formail -zcxSubject: <"$message") in
"Hello, here is your report for "*)
awk 'BEGIN { h=1 }
h { if ($0 ~ /^$/) h=0 ; next } # skip headers
/^Content-Disposition: attachment/ { a=1 } # find att
a && /^$/ { p=1; next }
p && /^$/ { exit }
p' "$message" |
base64 -d ;;
esac
This will extract the Subject: header and compare it to a glob pattern. I expect this is what you mean by "based on subject" -- if we find a matching subject header, examine this message, otherwise discard.
The crude Awk script attempts to isolate the base64 data and pass it to base64 -d for extraction. This contains a number of pesky and somewhat crude assumptions about the message format, and probably requires significant additional tweaking. Briefly, we skip the headers, then look for MIME headers identifying an attachment, and print that, skipping everything else in the message. If this header is missing, or identifies the wrong MIME part, you will get no results, or (worse) incorrect results. Also, the /^Content-Disposition:/ regex could theoretically match on a line which is not a MIME header, though this seems highly unlikely (but might actually happen if you are looking e.g. at a bounce message).
A more robust approach would involve a MIME extraction tool or perhaps a custom script to actually parse the MIME structure and extract the part you want. Without details about what exactly you need, I'm not able to provide that. (This would also allow you to use the sender's specified filename; the above script simply prints the decoded payload to standard output.)
Note also that formail has no idea about RFC2047 encoding, so if the subject is not plain ASCII, you have to specify the encoded form in the script.
After the fetchmail fetches mails, the new mails are stored in a file like /var/mail/user. We can open the file user by text editor like vim.
How can I create such text-based email files? Say, I want to send an email with contents:
From: sender <sender#xx.com>
To: receiver <receiver#xx.com>
Subject: test subject
Contents: ...
Attached: file1.txt, file2.png, file3.pdf
The problem is how to make these to be a formal text-based email.
Besides, If I have such an email file. How can I extract files(say, subjects, contents, attached files, etc.) by some command line tools. I know I can open it with program like mutt. Can this be done using a command line utility?
There is a bunch of standards you need to understand, but email is fundamentally text.
The file format in /var/spool/mail or /var/mail/user etc is typically Berkeley mbox. This is not formally defined anywhere, but consists of a sequence of RFC5322 (née RFC822) email messages, each preceded by a From_ line, the format of which is basically From %s %C where %s is the sender's email address (what you also see in Return-Path:) and %C is the date when the message arrived. Notice the two spaces between the format strings!
The toplevel email message is RFC5322 but on top of that, you need to understand MIME.
mbox: RFC 4155
Email message format: RFC5322
MIME: RFC2045 RFC2046 RFC2047 RFC2048
You will also stumble over (E)SMTP RFC5321 which is only tangential to your question, but good to know. Notice how 821 and 822 (and later 2821 and 2822, and now 5321 and 5322) have adjacent RFC numbers.
Furthermore, there is a wild, wild West of non-standard headers, some of which are nonetheless significant. Dan Bernstein's reference http://cr.yp.to/immhf.html is a lifesaver. As a general guideline, what spammers typically do is copy/paste headers without understanding them; therefore, an essential practice for deliverability is "don't do that". In other words, if you don't know what a header is for, don't use it.
Any modern programming language will come with libraries to create and manipulate RFC5322 and MIME, and probably mbox too. For creating a message you can send somewhere, you don't need mbox anyway, just something along the lines of (pseudocode)
message = new MIME({'Subject': 'hello', 'From': 'me#example.net',
'To': 'My Friend <you#example.com>'});
message.addbodypart('text/plain', 'Hi Fred.\nHow are you?');
message.addbodypart('image/png', {'file': '/home/you/logo.png'});
smtp = new SMTP('mail.example.net', 587, {'user': 'me', 'pass': 'xyzzy'});
smtp.send(message);
A multipart message looks something like what you describe in your question, except there is no specific header to identify "attachments" and actually conceptually no "attachments", just "body parts". Here is a simple MIME message to show what the message in your question would properly look something like.
From: sender <sender#example.com>
To: receiver <receiver#example.com>
Subject: test subject
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="so_long_eFlop"
This is a MIME multipart message. Nobody actually sees what it says here.
--so_long_eFlop
Content-type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-disposition: inline
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
Many mail clients will display this as the "main part" but MIME does not
define any particular hierarchy. Many mail clients will generate a
text/plain rendering and a text/html rendering of the message you type in,
and the recipient's mail client will decide -- based on user preferences
-- which one to display. Anyway, I will not create an example of that
here. This is just "a text message with a picture attached", or, more
precisely, a MIME message with two body parts.
Oh, the content-disposition: inline is usually just implied for a
text/plain part. Some clients will override or ignore the disposition
set by the sender anyway.
--so_long_eFlop
Content-type: image/png
Content-disposition: attachment
Content-transfer-encoding: base64
Iam+not/attaching+a/real00picture+here/just/a/bunch0of/binary/goo===
--so_long_eFlop--
The file format is called "mbox". There's a good article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox), as well as all over the Internet. Like RFC 4155. :)
telnet your.mail.server 25
helo localhost.localdomain
mail from:<sender#address.com>
rcpt to:<recipient#address.com>
data
From:Me
Subject:This is an email via Telnet
Hi,
The first line connects to the server on port 25. Replace "your.mail.server" with the name or address of the MX server for the domain.
Most servers expect the second "HELO" line to begin the session. I have seen servers that don't care, but in general they should throw an error.
You must have a "MAIL FROM:" line with the address you expect a reply to come to.
The mail is going nowhere if you don't specify the "RCPT TO:" address.
The message body begins with "DATA" line. This will usually be met with instruction on how to end the message - a single "." on a line by itself.
The "From:" and "Subject:" headers above are optional. You can add any additional headers here.
.
quit
I would like to generate serial emails on the linux commandline. Assume I have a file indicating mail address, subject and message text in columns on separate lines for each recipient. I.e.
recipient1#mail.com subject1 text1
recipient2#mail.com subject2 text2
...
The script should use standard commands as I intend to send it to colleagues who should create some emails for me.
The loop over the lines could be with xargs ... Can I use the commandline tool mail?
It is important that the mails are not send immediately. Ideally it creates files for import in the users preferred mail client. So that senders can check the mails before they submit.
I also would like to be able to add attachments to the Mails.
I tried e.g.
function mail_kmail {
kmail -s "$2" --body "$3" --attach "$4" --composer "$1"
}
function mail_thunderbird {
thunderbird -compose "to='$1',subject='$2',body='$3',attachment='$4'"
}
and reading the input data from file with
while read recipient subject body attach $file
do
mail_kmail "$recipient" "$subject" "$body" "$attach";
done
but this will work only if my colleagues installed and set up either of these mail clients.
I found this (closed) related question:
How can i send automated email in linux? .
You can use mutt to send the emails, here is an example:
echo "This is the message body" | mutt -a "/path/to/file.to.attach" -s "subject of message" -- recipient#domain.com
Since it's hard to know what you are trying to achieving here, you can even create a configuration file to be used, but you'll to investigate more or give more details about your use case.