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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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5 Answers 5

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echo -e "to: receiver@domain.tld\nsubject: subject\n"| (cat - && uuencode /path/to/attachment attachment.name) | ssmtp receiver@gmail.com

This solution does not depend on mutt.

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    How is this getting a negative vote? it solves the problem.
    – metrix
    Sep 16, 2013 at 14:43
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    By the way, SSMTP is used by many people to send automated E-mails through Gmail: nixtutor.com/linux/send-mail-with-gmail-and-ssmtp
    – metrix
    Sep 16, 2013 at 15:23
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    I know this answer came in over a year after the question was asked, but this is the answer to the question. Works great, thanks.
    – RTF
    Aug 1, 2014 at 19:18
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    4 years later, July 2017 - This is the answer I was looking for. Thank you, @metrix!
    – SDsolar
    Jul 21, 2017 at 5:09
  • missing uuencode command
    – Pavel Niedoba
    Aug 28, 2017 at 15:08
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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_1 ATTACHMENT_FILE_2 -- 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, 2012 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, 2012 at 15:34
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    @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, 2012 at 4:47
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$ echo -e "to: receiver@domain.tld\nsubject: test\n"| (cat - && uuencode /path/to/file file.name) | ssmtp sender@gmail.com

Provided that SSMTP is configured, and you've verified that messages without attachments are reaching their destination and does not depend on mutt.

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  • I don't think this answers the original question.
    – slm ♦
    Sep 2, 2013 at 3:10
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 $ sudo apt-get install uudeview
 $ echo -e "From: myaddress@mydomain.com\nTo: youraddress@yourdomain.com\nSubject: mySubject\n\nBody-Text"|uuenview -a -bo MyAttachment|sendmail -t
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0

another alternative to uuencode is to use base64 commend instead ->

cat msg_source.txt | (cat - base64 && attachment.bin) | ssmtp -vvvv email@domain.com

where msg_source.txt contains header tags, like To:, From:, Subject:, Content-Type:, etc

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