Mailx send html message [duplicate]

I want to send a html message with Mailx. When I try the following command

mailx -s "Subject"  [email protected]  < email.html

I get the content of email.html in plain text. In the message the header Content-Type is set to text/plain. The -a option tries to send a file so I didn't find out how to modify the header. This answer almost worked, it sets well the Content-Type to text/html but doesn't substitute the default Content-Type which is text/plain.

mailx -s "$(echo -e "This is the subject\nContent-Type: text/html")" [email protected]  < email.html

gives this result :

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: This is the subject
Content-Type: text/html
Message-ID: <538d7b66.Xs0x9HsxnJKUFWuI%[email protected]>
User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.4 7/29/08
MIME-Version: 1.0
 boundary="=_538d7b66.z5gaIQnlwb1f/AOkuuC+GwF1evCaG/XIHQMbMMxbY6satTjK"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--=_538d7b66.z5gaIQnlwb1f/AOkuuC+GwF1evCaG/XIHQMbMMxbY6satTjK
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

<html>
<body>
<p>Helo wolrd</p>
</body>
</html>

PS : I also tried with uuencode. When I try to display the message in the webmail I get a blank page...

It's easy, if your mailx command supports the -a (append header) option:

$ mailx -a 'Content-Type: text/html' -s "my subject" [email protected] < email.html

If it doesn't, try using sendmail:

# create a header file
$ cat mailheader
To: [email protected]
Subject: my subject
Content-Type: text/html

# send
$ cat mailheader email.html | sendmail -t

There are many different versions of mail around. When you go beyond mail -s subject to1@address1 to2@address2

With some mailx implementations, e.g. from mailutils on Ubuntu or Debian's bsd-mailx, it's easy, because there's an option for that.
```
mailx -a 'Content-Type: text/html' -s "Subject" to@address <test.html
```

With the Heirloom mailx, there's no convenient way. One possibility to insert arbitrary headers is to set editheaders=1 and use an external editor (which can be a script).

## Prepare a temporary script that will serve as an editor.

## This script will be passed to ed.
temp_script=$(mktemp)
cat <<'EOF' >>"$temp_script"
1a
Content-Type: text/html
.
$r test.html
w
q
EOF
## Call mailx, and tell it to invoke the editor script
EDITOR="ed -s $temp_script" heirloom-mailx -S editheaders=1 -s "Subject" to@address <<EOF
~e
.
EOF
rm -f "$temp_script"

With a general POSIX mailx, I don't know how to get at headers.

If you're going to use any mail or mailx, keep in mind that

This isn't portable even within a given Linux distribution. For example, both Ubuntu and Debian have several alternatives for mail and mailx.
When composing a message, mail and mailx treats lines beginning with ~ as commands. If you pipe text into mail, you need to arrange for this text not to contain lines beginning with ~.

If you're going to install software anyway, you might as well install something more predictable than mail/Mail/mailx. For example, mutt. With Mutt, you can supply most headers in the input with the -H option, but not Content-Type, which needs to be set via a mutt option.

mutt -e 'set content_type=text/html' -s 'hello' 'to@address' <test.html

Or you can invoke sendmail directly. There are several versions of sendmail out there, but they all support sendmail -t to send a mail in the simplest fashion, reading the list of recipients from the mail. (I think they don't all support Bcc:.) On most systems, sendmail isn't in the usual $PATH, it's in /usr/sbin or /usr/lib.

cat <<'EOF' - test.html | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
To: to@address
Subject: hello
Content-Type: text/html

EOF

I had successfully used the following on Arch Linux (where the -a flag is used for attachments) for several years:

mailx -s "The Subject $(echo -e \\\nContent-Type: text/html)" [email protected] < email.html

This appended the Content-Type header to the subject header, which worked great until a recent update. Now the new line is filtered out of the -s subject. Presumably, this was done to improve security.

Instead of relying on hacking the subject line, I now use a bash subshell:

(
    echo -e "Content-Type: text/html\n"
    cat mail.html
 ) | mail -s "The Subject" -t [email protected]

And since we are really only using mailx's subject flag, it seems there is no reason not to switch to sendmail as suggested by @dogbane:

(
    echo "To: [email protected]"
    echo "Subject: The Subject"
    echo "Content-Type: text/html"
    echo
    cat mail.html
) | sendmail -t

The use of bash subshells avoids having to create a temporary file.

Mailx send html message [duplicate]

Related

Recent Posts