Last updated on October 4th, 2022 at 12:59 pm

It is a good idea to use sendmail command to send an html email from a linux or unix server. By using this command the email content will be displayed in HTML format (not just HTML code). In this tutorial I will be covering two options to send HTML email using shell script,

Using SendMail

If you don’t have sendmail installed please install it first. I personally suggest to install sendmail to do this trick.

Save all your HTML content in to a file with some name. For example I am giving the file name as email.html

Add the below content

<h1>This is a test email<h2><b>Mistonline.in one of the largest website tutorial provider</b>

Save this file to some path like /home/admin

Now create a shell script named test_email.sh in path /home/admin and add the below content, Make sure execute permission for test_email.sh file is set accordingly.

Note: Change the To: [email protected] to email address of your choice

#!/bin/sh
host=`hostname`
(echo To: [email protected]
  echo From: server@$host
  echo "Content-Type: text/html; "
  echo Subject: Some Subject
  echo
  cat email.html ) | sendmail -t

If you do not want a file to be created but just want some html content to be send through email then use the below commands

#!/bin/sh
host=`hostname`
(echo To: [email protected]
  echo From: server@$host
  echo "Content-Type: text/html; "
  echo Subject: Some Subject
  echo
  echo "<h1>This is a test email<h2><b>Mistonline.in one of the largest website tutorial provider</b>" ) | sendmail -t

Sample Output

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Using mail

If you don’t have sendmail installed then try using the mail command.

Send HTML email in a single mail command

# mail -a "Content-type: text/html" -s "Testing HTML Email" [email protected] << EOF
<html><h2>This is a test email</h2><a href="https://webtutorials.dev">Click Here</a></html>
EOF

Here,

-a, –append=HEADER: VALUE append given header to the message being sent

-s, is the subject of the email

Send HTML email by appending HTML file in the mail command

mail -a "Content-type: text/html" -s "Testing HTML Email" [email protected] < email.html

In the above command email.html contains the HTML format we are intending to send as an email.

Make sure to replace [email protected] to the email address of your choice.

Sample output