send mail from command line with attached file

I had to send a mail using only command line. I was surprised it isn’t straightforward at all. I didn’t had pine nor mutt or anything like that. Just mail and mailx.

What Internet say (via google) is

uuencode fic.jpg fic.jpg | mail -s 'Subject'

I tried it. And it works almost each times. But for my file, it didn’t worked. I compressed it to .gz, .bz2 and .zip. Using .bz2 format it worked nicely, but not with other formats. Instead of having an attached file I saw this in my email.

begin 664 fic.jpg
M(R$O=7-R+V)I;B]E;G8@>G-H"GAL<STD,0H*9F]R(&QI;F4@:6X@)"@\("1X
M;',@*0H@("`@9&-R/20H96-H;R`D;&EN92!\(&%W:R`M1EP[("=[<')I;G0@
...
M93U<(FUO='-<(CX\=F%L=64^/&ET96T@;F%M93U<(F-T>%]M8UPB/BD\=F%L
M=64O/B@\+VET96T^*2-<)#$\=F%L=64^)&ME>7=O<F1S/"]V86QU93Y<)#(C
end

Not really readable. After some research I found the solution. Use MIME instead of uuencode.

Finally I made it manually using sendmail. I didn’t dare to use telnet. The command to use is:

sendmail -t -oi < mailcontent.txt

Of course you need to create the mailcontent.txt file. It should contains:

From: from@mail.com
To: to@mail.com
Subject: View the attached file
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="-"

This is a MIME encoded message. Decode it with "Decoder"
or any other MIME reading software. Decoder is available
at <http://www.etresoft.com>.
---
Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="fic.jpg"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="fic.jpg"

H4sICB6Ke0wAA2Rjcl93aXRob3V0X2tleXdvcmQuY3N2ANSdW5ubOJPH7/e7
7Brw+dmrTk8yk7yTSTaZeWd2b/TIIGy6MRAE7ng+/VaJgwF3g522SsxN2+3T
/4eOJamqmARP+yibvI8ykUYim+x5EE2euBfIyd3byZ+fvvzr7svbu8ndTx/f
...

And to obtain the “encoded” file in base64 I used:

uuencode -m fic.jpg fic.jpg

That is all. Sometimes technology is so easy to use. If I need it another time I should consider to make a shell script to automatize this.

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