Comments on: Send HTML formatted mail from Unix using Sendmail

By: cool

cool — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:16:15 +0000

HTML emails are cool!

By:

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 06:47:42 +0000

I am new to this forum and have been battling with HTML formatting of e-mails. I have used the options on this thread, and they work OK, now I need to be able to send PDF attachments as well.

I am currently using sendmail to send HTML formatted e-mails as follows :
(cat body.txt) | sendmail -t recipient

I use mail to send non-HTML formatted e-mail bodies with PDF attachments as follows :

(cat body.txt;uuencode attach1.pdf attach1.pdf ;uuencode attach2.pdf attach2.pdf ) | mail -sSubject recipient

sendmail works fine but will not send the attachment
mail works fine but will not allow HTML formatted body.

Please Help

By: qmchenry

qmchenry — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 19:35:51 +0000

I tried to find a definitive reference out there on the boundary string, but couldn't. In some IETF documents on MIME they use Content-Type: Multipart/Related; boundary=example-1. To my knowledge, it only needs to be unique within the email and probably only exists to allow multiple boundaries in an email.

By: oldUnixGuy

oldUnixGuy — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 11:53:48 +0000

I had your script modified and working for me in a few minutes. You saved me a fair amount of work. The HTML even displays corretly in Lotus Notes.

I was looking for an alternate Unix mail client that would send HTML and while reading the Mutt docs noted that Mutt (like mail, mailx) is just a front end to sendmail. The light came on and I Googled for ‘unix sendmail html’ and your item came out at the top – right where it belongs.

Just curious, is there any significance to the make up of the ‘boundary’ string? I plugged in my own server name and it worked. Does it just need to be a string that’s random enough to be unique?

By: Scrunchy

Scrunchy — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 13:33:31 +0000

Unlike that previous dweeb, I have some in-house uses for sending html-formatted mail from unix. Your solution works. Thanks very much.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Dec 2004 06:53:35 +0000

HTML email sucks!

By: braindonor

braindonor — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:47:13 +0000

The bottom half is actually HTML code…and the page seems to be displaying it as HTML, rather than just text. Change the “['s" to "<'s" and the "]’s” to “>’s” in the items below.

echo “Content-Type: text/html”
echo “”
echo “[HTML]
[BODY bgcolor=gray]
[blockquote][font color=red]Test[/font] [font color=white]Message[/font] [font color=blue]Body[/font][/blockquote]
[/body]
[/html]”
echo “–PAA08673.1018277622/server.domain.com”
) | sendmail -t

Tom