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I can send email from my gmail account by ssmtp in Linux now. But how can I attach files to the email?

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1 Answer

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To send an attachment, you need to encode the message using MIME.

You could use Mutt

mutt -s SUBJECT -a ATTACHMENT_FILE EMAIL_ADDRESS < MESSAGE_FILE

or mpack

mpack -s SUBJECT -D MESSAGE_FILE ATTACHMENT_FILE EMAIL_ADDRESS

See also:

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Thanks. So is that to say that it is NOT possible to send an attachment by ssmtp alone? – deepsky Jul 26 '12 at 15:26
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It's possible, but you'd have to generate all the MIME headers somehow. Why do you need to only use ssmtp? If ssmtp provides /usr/lib/sendmail or /usr/sbin/sendmail, any local mail program should be able to send via ssmtp. – Mikel Jul 26 '12 at 15:34
@deepsky ssmtp is not a user interface. It's an MTA (mail transport agent), which is infrastructure meant to be accessed via an MUA (mail user agent, also known as a "mailreader"). It's sort of impressive that you were able to wrangle ssmtp by yourself without an MUA, but it's not a reasonable method of doing things. It's a good network-debugging skill you've learned though! – Alan Curry Jul 27 '12 at 4:47

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