How to set the From email address for mailx command?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1296979

Question

I am working on a KornShell (ksh) script running on a Solaris server that will send out an email when and error condition is met. I am sending the email via mailx.

Question: How do I set the "From" email address on the mailx command?

Current Code:

echo ${msg_txt} | mailx -s "Script Failure" ${to_email}

Note: The command works fine, however, the "From" is the name of the user I am running the script as and I would like for this to another email address.

How would I accomplish this?

Was it helpful?

Solution

You can use the "-r" option to set the sender address:

mailx -r me@example.com -s ...

OTHER TIPS

The "-r" option is invalid on my systems. I had to use a different syntax for the "From" field.

-a "From: Foo Bar <foo.bar@someplace.com>"

In case you also want to include your real name in the from-field, you can use the following format

mailx -r "me@example.com (My Name)" -s "My Subject" ...

If you happen to have non-ASCII characters in you name, like My AEÆoeøaaå (Æ= C3 86, ø= C3 B8, å= C3 A5), you have to encode them like this:

mailx -r "me@example.com (My =?utf-8?Q?AE=C3=86oe=C3=B8aa=C3=A5?=)" -s "My Subject" ...

Hope this can save someone an hour of hard work/research!

On debian where bsd-mailx is installed by default, the -r option does not work. However you can use mailx -s subject recipient@abc.com -- -f sender@abc.com instead. According to man page, you can specify sendmail options after --.

The package nail provides an enhanced mailx like interface. It includes the -r option.

On Centos 5 installing the package mailx gives you a program called mail, which doesn't support the mailx options.

Just ran into this syntax problem on a CentOS 7 machine.

On a very old Ubuntu machine running mail, the syntax for a nicely composed email is

echo -e "$body" | mail -s "$subject" -a "From: Sender Name <$sender>" "$recipient"

However on a CentOS 7 box which came with mailx installed, it's quite different:

echo -e "$body" | mail -s "$subject" -S "from=Sender Name <$sender>" "$recipient"

Consulting man mail indicates that -r is deprecated and the 'From' sender address should now be set directly using -S "variable=value".

In these and subsequent examples, I'm defining $sender as "Sender Name <sender.address@domain.tld>" and $recipients as "recipient.name@domain.tld" as I do in my bash script.

You may then find, as I did, that when you try to generate the email's body content in your script at the point of sending the email, you encounter a strange behaviour where the email body is instead attached as a binary file ("ATT00001.bin", "application/octet-stream" or "noname", depending on client).

This behaviour is how Heirloom mailx handles unrecognised / control characters in text input. (More info: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1136493, which itself references the mailx man page for the solution.)

To get around this, I used a method which pipes the generated output through tr before passing to mail, and also specifies the charset of the email:

echo -e "$body" | tr -d \\r | mail -s "$subject" -S "from=$sender" -S "sendcharsets=utf-8,iso-8859-1" "$recipients"

In my script, I'm also explicitly delaring the locale beforehand as it's run as a cronjob (and cron doesn't inherit environmental variables):

LANG="en_GB.UTF8" ; export LANG ;

(An alternate method of setting locales for cronjobs is discussed here)

More info on these workarounds via https://stackoverflow.com/a/29826988/253139 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/3120227/253139.

On macOS Sierra, creating ~/.mailrc with smtp setup did the trick:

set smtp-use-starttls
set smtp=smtp://smtp.gmail.com:587
set smtp-auth=login
set smtp-auth-user=youremail@gmail.com
set smtp-auth-password=yourpass

Then to send mail from CLI:

echo "your message" | mail -s "your subject" to_email@gmail.com

On Ubuntu Bionic 18.04, this works as desired:

$ echo -e "testing email via yourisp.com from command line\n\nsent on: $(date)" | mailx --append='FROM:Foghorn Leghorn <fleghorn@yourisp.com>' -s "test cli email $(date)" -- recipient@acme.com

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