How to send HTML body email with multiple text attachments using sendmail - unix

Question

I want to send a HTML file as message body and want to attach multiple text files to this email message.
Since html file needs to be sent, sendmail has to be used ( I could not do it using mailx ).
How do you send HTML body email and multiple text attachments using sendmail?

Answer 1

Assuming you have uunecode available in your system you can send email with multiple attachments like this:
#!/bin/bash
...
...
...
BOUNDARY="=== This is the boundary between parts of the message. ==="
{
echo "From: $MAILFROM"
echo "To: $MAILTO"
echo "Subject:" $SUBJECT
echo "MIME-Version: 1.0"
echo "Content-Type: MULTIPART/MIXED; "
echo " BOUNDARY="\"$BOUNDARY\"
echo
echo " This message is in MIME format. But if you can see this,"
echo " you aren't using a MIME aware mail program. You shouldn't "
echo " have too many problems because this message is entirely in"
echo " ASCII and is designed to be somewhat readable with old "
echo " mail software."
echo
echo "--${BOUNDARY}"
echo "Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII"
echo
echo "This email comes with multiple attachments."
echo
echo
echo "--${BOUNDARY}"
echo "Content-Type: application/zip; charset=US-ASCII; name="${ZIPFILE}
echo "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="`basename ${ZIPFILE}`
echo
uuencode $ZIPFILE $ZIPFILE
echo
echo "--${BOUNDARY}--"
echo "Content-Type: application/pdf; charset=US-ASCII; name="${PDFFILE}
echo "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="`basename ${PDFFILE}`
echo
uuencode $PDFFILE $PDFFILE
echo
echo "--${BOUNDARY}--"
} | /usr/lib/sendmail -t

Answer 2

I don't think sendmail is going to help you with that. Go for a client like mutt, and do e.g. mutt -a file1 -a file2 -- recipient#do.main. Or go for perl.

Answer 3

Here is a bash script I use to send reports I generate to people. They are sent as attachments. Place your HTML in the "body" variable of the script. I will leave the parametrization of the variables up to you.
#!/bin/bash
function get_mimetype(){
file --mime-type "$1" | sed 's/.*: //'
}
from="me.last#company.com"
to="some.one#companyBlah.com"
subject="Your Report my Lord"
boundary="=== Boundary ==="
body="The reports are attached to this email"
declare -a attachments
attachments=( "fileOne.out" "fileTwo.out" "fileThree.out" "file-et-cetera.out")
# Build headers
{
printf '%s\n' "From: $from
To: $to
Subject: $subject
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"$boundary\"
--${boundary}
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"US-ASCII\"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
$body
"
for file in "${attachments[#]}"; do
[ ! -f "$file" ] && echo "Attachment $file not found, omitting file" >&2 && continue
mimetype=$(get_mimetype "$file")
printf '%s\n' "--${boundary}
Content-Type: $mimetype
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$file\"
"
base64 "$file"
echo
done
# print last boundary with closing --
printf '%s\n' "--${boundary}--"
} | sendmail -t -oi