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I am trying to send the contents of a logfile via email like this:

sendmail -f deamon@mydomain.tld recepient@mail.com < /private/var/log/mylog

Unfortunately, this does not work – the email arrives in the inbox but is empty.

The same is true for this variation:

echo "$(</private/var/log/mylog)" | sendmail -f deamon@mydomain.tld recepient@mail.com

But when echoing some string like this:

echo "testing" | sendmail -f deamon@mydomain.tld recepient@mail.com

the email arrives with the content. Also, using cat to view the file's content works too. This leads me to the conclusion that is has to be something with the way I wrote the command, but I don't see any syntax problem or similar.

What am I missing – why do the emails arrive empty when trying to send the file contents?

Seth
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Sven
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  • Could be because of a mail body limitation if your log file is greater than a few megabytes. Try this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1333097/how-to-send-a-html-email-with-the-bash-command-sendmail – LMC Feb 23 '17 at 23:17

1 Answers1

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sendmail expects "raw" message (headers and body separated by an empty line) over its standard input.

Try the command below

(echo Subject: Logfile; echo; cat /private/var/log/mylog) | sendmail -i -f daemon@mydomain.tld recepient@mail.com

-f daemon@mydomain.tld - set envelope sender address to daemon@mydomain.tld
-i - do not treat lines starting with . special

AnFi
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