Executing mail -s "testing" myemail@gmail.com just hangs. Why?

Question

I'm debugging a problem with a script not emailing out.

When i execute the following outside of the script:

mail -s "testing" myemail@gmail.com

It just hangs. The terminal doesn't give me any feedback what it's doing or if it has finished. I can only enter a another command by CTRL + Cing it. Any ideas why? Sometimes it does work if I let it hang long enough (I will get an email about 2 - 4 minutes later).

I'm running CENTOS 5 something. I've just uninstalled sendmail and installed postfix to see if this fixes it and the same thing appears to be happening.

Answer 1

If you enter the above and hit it should take you to a blank line and wait for you to type the actual text of the message. Once you've completed entering the message, you enter a .<enter> (dot or period followed by enter key) as the first character on a line and (depending on the version), it will usually ask you to enter any CC: addresses. Hit again to proceed past that and it should then send the mail.

The above command doesn't actually send anything, the -s sets the subject, but unless you include a file it will simply wait for you to type something. If, on the other hand, you want it to just send something quickly you can have it pull in a file as the content of the message, e.g. mail -s "testing" myemail@gmail.com < some_text_file. This will read some_text_file into the body of the email and send it immediately.