Linux / UNIX : How to send mails with attachments using mailx command

Question : How to send email with attachments from Linux machine using mailx command ?

Answer :

Basic syntax to send emails from linux machine using mailx command is show below :

# echo "this is the body of the email" | mailx -vvv -s "test mail" -r "From" -S smtp="your-smtp" someone@address

here,

-vvv =        Verbosity.
-s   =        Specifies the subject.
-r   =        Email sent from.
-S   =        Specifies the smtp server.

Method 1 : using uuencode (old method)

If the mailx version is below 12.x, you can use the uuencode command to send mails with attachments.

# uuencode [path/to/file] [name_of_attachment] | mailx -s "Subject" user@domain.com

Method 2 : -a switch in mailx command

Use the new attachment switch (-a) in mailx to send attachments with the mail. The -a options is easier to use that the uuencode command.

# mailx -a file.txt -s "Subject" user@domain.com

The above command will print a new blank line. Type the body of the message here and press [ctrl] + [d] to send. This will attach the file to the outbound email correctly with proper Content-Type and boundary headers.

To make this more “scriptable”, you can send the message without a body with the following:

# mailx -a file.txt -s "Subject" user@domain.com < /dev/null

To send mails with a message body, replace /dev/null in above command with your message body file.

In the newer version of mailx, the headers that are used in outgoing email changed from:

From: 
Date: 
To: 
Subject:

to to the below form:

From: 
Date: 
To: 
Subject: 
User-Agent: 
MIME-Version: 
Content-Type: 
Content-Transfer-Encoding: