How to send email from ssmtp with HTML

Question

I want to send an HTML report that is piped from another command, eg: mycommandthatprintshtml | mail [email protected] . When I do this currently, it prints all the html tags. Is there a way I can set the required headers to make it display in HTML formatted?

Solution

In addition to the email body, you also need to print the email headers:

echo "From: [email protected]\r\nDate: $(date)\r\nSubject: subject\r\nMIME-Version: 1.0\r\nContent-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\r\n\r\n$(mycommandthatprintshtml)" mail [email protected]

Note that From, Date, Subject are mandatory. MIME-Version and Content-Type are there to help the recipient understand how the email is formatted.

Comments

[Giel]

Message-ID is mandatory as well, or does SSMTP add it if necessary?

[Frederik Deweerdt]

The RFC 5322 says that the message-id should be present, but it's not mandatory. Most of the servers will add one for you if it isn't. I don't know if SSMTP adds one for you.

[Benny]

Any chance of an example with HTML message plus attachment(s)?

[bvj]

@RTF late comment, but likely possible using multipart/mixed. See unix.stackexchange.com/a/250189/182991