Sending mail from a Bash shell script

Question

I am writing a Bash shell script for Mac that sends an email notification by opening an automator application that sends email out with the default mail account in Mail.app. The

Answer 1

Actually, "mail" works just as well.

mail -s "subject line" name@address.ext < filename

works perfectly fine, as long as you have SMTP set up on your machine. I think that most Macs do, by default.

If you don't have SMTP, then the only thing you're going to be able to do is go through Mail.app. An ALTERNATIVE way to go through mail.app is via AppleScript. When you tell Mail.app to send mail via AppleScript you can tell it to not pop up any windows... (this does still require Mail.app to be configured).

Introduction to Scripting Mail has a good description of how to work with mail in AppleScript.