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

sendmail and even postfix may be too big to install if all you want to do is to send a few emails from your scripts.

If you have a Gmail account for example, you can use Google's servers to send email using SMTP. If you don't want to use gGoogle's server, as long as you have access to some SMTP server, it should work.

A very lightweight program that makes it easy to do so is msmtp. They have examples of configuration files in their documentation.

The easiest way to do it would be to set up a system-wide default:

account default
host smtp.gmail.com
from john.doe@gmail.com
user john.doe@gmail.com
password XXX
port 587

msmtp should be very easy to install. In fact, there is a port for it, so it could be as easy as port install msmtp.

After installing and configuring msmtp, you can send email to john.doe@gmail.com using:

mail -s  john.doe@gmail.com <.
EOF

You can put the above in a script. See man mail for details.