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Send mail from the command line on Mac OSX

September 2, 2009, 4:55 pm

I’ll be using my Gmail account to send mail. The first step is to configure the local Postfix server as a relay. Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf:

sudo vim /etc/postfix/main.cf

Search for a “relayhost=” line and add the following after it:

relayhost = smtp.gmail.com:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options =
smtp_sasl_local_domain = yourdomain.com
#smtpd_sasl_application_name = smtpd
broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes
smtpd_pw_server_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_use_tls=yes
smtp_tls_security_level=encrypt
tls_random_source=dev:/dev/urandom

Next create /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd and add the following (replace username and password accordingly):

smtp.gmail.com:587 username@gmail.com:password

Next run the following commands:

$ sudo postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
$ sudo chown root:wheel /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db
$ sudo chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db

You should be able to send mail from the command line now: 

$ mail -s "Test" username@domain.com

You can check mail’s log file at /var/log/mail.log

To be able to send attachments from the command line (true attachments that graphical mail clients understand) install mutt:

$ curl -O ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/devel/mutt-1.5.20.tar.gz
$ tar xfzvv mutt-1.5.20.tar.gz 
$ cd mutt-1.5.20/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

To send attachments use the following command:

echo "text body" | mutt -s "subject" -a file.dat -- username@domain.com

Or even better:

for i in {1..1000}; do echo "text body" | mutt -s "subject" -a file.dat -- username@domain.com; done

Happy mailing!

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Category: Networking, cool sw  |  Comment (RSS)
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2 Comments

  1. kate says:
    July 30, 2010 at 1:13 pm

    Hi, Jorge,

    Thank you for your post, it works absolutely fine. But I have a small question : how to change the name of the sender ? Because when I recieve the test mail in the field “From:” I see the name of the account under which the mail was sent — how to change that ?

    Thank you in advance,
    Kate.

  2. admin says:
    July 30, 2010 at 3:52 pm

    Probably you’ll have to edit Mutt’s configuration, I don’t see any command line switch to specify the “From: ” field. Maybe this is explained in Mutt’s documentation, take a look there. I’m sorry for not being of more help :)

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