mail (Unix)

mail is a command line email client for Unix and Unix-like operating systems.

History

"Electronic mail was there from the start", M. Douglas McIlroy writes in his article "A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986",^[1] and so a mail command was included in the first released version of research Unix, First Edition Unix.^[2] This version of mail was capable to send (append) messages to the mailboxes of other users on the Unix system, and it helped managing (reading) the mailbox of the current user.

In 1978 Kurt Shoens wrote a completely new version of mail for BSD2, referred to as Berkeley Mail. Although initially installed at /usr/ucb/Mail, (with the earlier Unix mail still available at /bin/mail), on most modern Unix and Linux systems the commands Mail, mail and/or mailx all invoke a descendant of this Berkeley Mail, which much later was the base for the standardization of a mail program by the OpenGroup, the POSIX standardized variant mailx.^[3]^[4]

Example usage

mail -s "You've got mail" -c [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

This sends a message with the subject "You've got mail" to two recipients, [email protected] and [email protected], and CCs (copies) a third, [email protected]. The message will be typed after the command is entered and will be ended with Control-D.

Any Unix command sequence that generates text can be used to send a message in one line. For example:

echo "Some message" | mail -s "meeting today" [email protected]

This is especially useful for having a system report its status automatically through email.

References

↑ McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139.
↑ , UNIX PROGRAMMER’S MANUAL, K. Thompson & D. M. Ritchie, November 3, 1971
↑ POSIX standard entry
↑ "mail, Mail, mailx, nail—history notes", Heirloom Project

External links

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more nl paste printf sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs yes

Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal expr lp od sleep true and false

List of Unix commands

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mail (Unix)

History

Example usage

See also

References

External links