Creating & sending HTML email from a shell script
This is a shell script that sends email containing HTML formatting. It uses a
here-document combined with cat and the - STDIN parameter, which is all piped to
sendmail. It appears mandatory to use the cat and here-document for handling
the message header info. Putting it into $HTML along with the message body
does not work, sendmail reports that it cannot figure out who the message recipient
is. Perhaps it is the semi-colon on the Content-Type line, and the here-document
is the only way to handle it correctly; but that is just a guess.
<![CDATA[
#!/bin/sh
MAILFROM='buzz.lightyear@starcommand.mil'
MAILTO='peter@example.com'
HTML="
<h2>An html email message from a shell script</h2>
This part of the message is just normal text. You can include
whatever <b>HTML markup</b> you like here as well. To send images,
you will have to put the images on an http server and then include
a link to the images.
<p>
<i>Didn't know you could do this, did you?!</i>
"
cat - <<EOF | sendmail -oi -t
From: ${MAILFROM}
To: ${MAILTO}
Subject: HTML email from shell script
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
MIME-Version: 1.0
$HTML
EOF
]]>
To include images in the email, post the images on a publicly accessible HTTP
server, and then include a link to it in the message.
A prior form of this script read the HTML part from an external file. To use this,
the cat command was slightly different:
<![CDATA[cat - /path/to/htmlfile <<EOF | sendmail -oi -t ]]>
04/08/2009