Send an image in the body of the mail using any of the mail utilities in Linux

Question

I am trying to send an email from Linux server, I want to send an image, not as an attachment, that should be displayed in the message body.

I tried.

mailx -s "TEST mail" <MASKED>@mask.com < download.JPEG

The above command gave a random junk data in the body of the mail

mailx --append "Content-type: text/html" -s "TEST mail" <MASKED>@mask.com < download.JPEG

The above command didn't work

mutt -a "download.JPEG" <MASKED>@mask.com -s "TEST mail" < /dev/null

The above command sent the image as an attachment.

UUENCODE is not installed in our server, so we shouldn't use the same.

I don't want anyone of the above. I want my picture to be displayed on the body of my mail instead.

Any help on this is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

To get the picture to be displayed in-line, it must be encoded as a valid MIME object with a Content-Disposition: inline header in it.

The mpack command can do this.

Try sending an email like this:

mpack -s "TEST mail" -c image/jpeg download.JPEG <MASKED>@example.com

Or if you want to output the result into a file instead of sending it directly:

mpack -s "TEST mail" -c image/jpeg download.JPEG -o email-with-image.txt

Then you can send it later with e.g.:

mailx <MASKED>@example.com < email-with-image.txt

If you want to add text to your message before the image, write it into a file, and add a -d text-before.txt option to the mpack command. For adding text after the image, just appending it to the mpack-produced file should work.