How to Send Email using Linux Command Line

Author : Piyush Gupta

We all know the importance of emails these days for information transfer. There are many free emails service providers which we used for use like Gmail, Yahoo, etc, which provides a web interface for sending and receiving emails. But this is not enough, sometimes we also required to send emails from system command line. This tutorial will provide you multiple ways to send emails from the Linux command line. This is useful for sending email through our shell scripts, cron-jobs etc.

There are various ways to send emails from the command line but here I am sharing few options used by most users. You can use anyone option given below to send email from Linux command line.

Using ‘sendmail’ Command

Sendmail is a most popular SMTP server used in most of Linux/Unix distribution. Sendmail allows sending email from command line. Use below instructions to send email using ‘sendmail‘ command.

Created a file with email content:

cat /tmp/email.txt

Subject: Terminal Email Send

Email Content line 1
Email Content line 2

Subject: line will be used as subject for email.

Now send email using the following command.

sendmail user@example.com  < /tmp/email.txt

Using ‘mail’ Command

mail command is most popular command to send emails from Linux terminal. Use few of below examples to send an email.

mail -s "Test Subject" user@example.com < /dev/null

• -s is used for defining subject for email.

Also, you can send an attachment with this command. Use -a for mailx and -A for mailutils.

mail -a /opt/backup.sql -s "Backup File" user@example.com < /dev/null

• Here -a is used for attachments. Use -A for debian based systems, which uses mailutils package.

You may face issue: Bash: mail: command not found

Also, we can add comma separated emails to send the email to multiple recipients together.

mail -s "Test Email"  user@example.com,user2@example.com < /dev/null

Using 'mutt' command

Mutt is basically used for reading emails from Linux terminal from local user mailboxes, also useful to read emails from POP/IMAP servers. Mutt command is little similar to mail command. Use few of below examples to send an email.

mutt -s "Test Email" user@example.com < /dev/null

Send an email including an attachment

mutt  -s "Test Email" -a /opt/backup.sql user@example.com < /dev/null

Using 'SSMTP' Command

sSMTP allows users to send emails from SMTP server from Linux command line. For example to send an email to user admin@example.com use following command. Now type your subject of the email as below with keyword Subject. After that type your message to be sent to the user, After finishing your message press CTRL+d (^d) to send the email.

ssmtp admin@example.com
Subject: Test SSMTP Email
Email send test using SSMTP
via SMTP server.
^d