Sendmail with To, Cc , Bcc fields and subject ,message body etc

Sendmail is a pretty old mail interface and hence sending mail with all fields like Subject, Body and Content using sendmail is a bit tedious. I have seen users sometime getting frustrated with sendmail because they do not know how to use it properly and utilize its full features. They come to unix admin for help in sorting out their issues. In this post i will show how to add To, Cc , Bcc fields and subject / message body in the sendmail message. I will share a trick to get sendmail working as desired.

First create a sendmail.txt file with below contents :-

*********************************************************************************

From: root@pnc.com
To: abhi@xyz.com
Cc: nlm@xyz.com
Date: echo "`date`"
Subject: HELLO
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text

Write the message body here , this is the mail content.  

*********************************************************************************

The above plain text file contains all the desired fields. Most important part is the Content-Type declaration. 

Then run the below command from unix prompt

# cat sendmail.txt | /usr/lib/sendmail -t 

The -t option of sendmail as per manpages

     -t          Read message for recipients.  To:, Cc:, and Bcc: lines will
                 be scanned for recipient addresses.  The Bcc: line will be
                 deleted before transmission.

The above command simply takes input for sendmail command from the text file we just created. Once you send the mail you can see all fields are visible and sendmail works as per your requirement. Do let me know if you face any issue in running sendmail with these options.