Terminal tip: easy email attachments

Now if I can just find my Telebit TrailBlazer and get that uucp 'g' spoofing going again...

Um, unless I didn't read this correctly, I think there's a pretty big step missing... how does the Mac know where to send the mail? AFAIK, for this to work, the mail server/MTA has to be set to communicate to someone, somehow... at the very least, this will result in a return address like 'yourname@yourmachine.local' which will get thrown in the spam bin by almost any ISP that receives it.

I just tried it on my 10.4 machine and was immediately told
postdrop: warning: unable to look up public/pickup: No such file or directory

Oooh... what a nasty hint....

As mentioned above, uuencoding is not a nice way to do things. If you are looking for a nice tool to do the job - http://caspian.dotconf.net/menu/Software/SendEmail/ - available through darwin ports and will mime things up nicely for you (as well as allow you to do a bunch of other things with varying degrees of usefulness).

What account does this use to send the email? What is the return address of the email?

For anyone who wants a little extra help...

http://murphymac.com/new-and-improved-finder-emailing/

No need to use parenthesis in the original command, as those span a an entirely new subshell but all you need in this case is grouping of commands. The following will do:

{ command1; command2 } | command3

There's a lot more to subshells than grouping, including a lot of unnecessary overhead for this case.

-jmpp

Or....
You could just install quicksilver
:-p

... but you already knew that.

This will of course fail if you use a single quote in your message ("How's it going?"), and uuencode is not the right way to do a file attachment; it may be picked up by a few mail applications, but to do a proper attachment you need to set the right MIME headers and encode it properly. Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to be building shell commands out of strings and executing them to do stuff like this when Mail has a perfectly serviceable AppleScript interface. I don't know how much of this will survive the comment formatting, but you could use something like the following:

tell application "Mail"
set msg to make new outgoing message with properties ¬
{subject:"hello there", content:"here's some picture I took"}
tell msg to make new to recipient with properties {address:"yourfriend@example.com"}
tell content of msg to make new attachment with properties {file name:"myimage.jpg"}
send msg
end tell

Wow, manual uuencoding...

It feels like it's 1996 all over again. :)

I use MSMTP to send email by the Terminal and it supports SSL and other neat features.

http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/