How to send html emails from Linux / Unix using mutt

Hello Everybody

We recently created a new database health check for one of our customer as part of the DMDRS (Database Monitor Diagnostic & Resolution Services) service, it is a Sqlplus HTML report that is executed automatically through a cron job and then mailed automatically. The challenge was to display the email on the client as an html page. As usual I did my research on the internet and I found tons answers, most of them involved some amount of work and new software install. In general IT people don't link HTML emails because it posses a security risk and consumes several times the size of a regular email. In my case it was a marketing decision, the president of this company wants to see this email and I wanted to impress him, so HTML does the trick. Yes I could send the HTML report as an attachment but I want to make it easier for my customer (one click instead of 2 clicks).

I was getting crazy trying different options there is plenty of information on the internet however none of the answers worked for me. I did send an email out to my network asking them if they have done this before and to my surprise I got no answer. However one of my friends Michael Monostra after playing with it got it right, so kudos to Mike for his help and support.

Before getting to it, I consider important explaining a concept. What is MIME about?, we all hear it before we have seen the word in some of our emails but how many of you really know what it is?.

MIME or Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension in a nutshell is a specification for the format of a non-text email. The main characteristic is the presence of the MIME header, it tells your MIME compatible browser or email client that the message is not text, so it interprets your message in a different way.

So here is the way to make it work, we are going to use "mutt" command lie to send the email, I found that mutt is available in most of the Unix and Linux versions and installed by default.

1.- In your $HOME/.muttrc (initialization file for mutt) add the following lines (this file is likely to not exist, just create it).

set hostname = Your hostname
set realname = "The senders name"

2.- You need to check that you have a mime type like "text/html" associated with the extensions .html and .htm in either of this files /etc/mime.types and $HOME/.mime.types

3.- This is the actual command

mutt -e 'my_hdr Content-Type:text/html' -s "subject for the email" < filename.html


NOTE: During my tests I found that some providers won't allow you to send emails from dynamic IP address by any other method other than using their SMTP server, so I was not able to send the email from my home using Comcast ISP and a non business account. Some email servers will not deliver this emails and bounce it back because they do reverse lookup base on the hostname of the sender and if that is not setup properly it will be block. During my test I found that Yahoo and Gmail will not care about it and will receive the emails.

I hope this is helpful to you.

Rafael Orta