How to use G mail form terminal (Linux)
Great news g mail our favorite mail service can be accessed form command line!!
Now you can access your favorite mail service -gmail form terminal in
a linux system with a command line interface. People may wonder why
anyone would want to use gmail from the command line, when Google has
created such a nice user friendly interface for its users. There are a
lot of reasons why one would want to use a CLI (command-line interface)
for sending mail. One of the main reasons being the power of shell
scripting in a Linux machine. You can automate the entire process by
writing small shell scripts and make life much easier. The other reason
why I use the command line way is because it uses very less bandwidth.
Due the recent D-DOS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack on the
domain name system by a group of really talented Hackers my computer
seemed to take ages to load even Facebook that was when the terminal way
of sending mails came in handy.
Step1 : Open a new terminal and type the following command to install the package from the Ubuntu repositories.
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sudo apt-get install msmtp-mta
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You have to enter your system password to provide administrative rights.
Say ‘y’ when it asks for you choice after the size of the file to be
downloaded is determined.
Step2 : Now fire up you favorite text editor by typing
If Vim is not already installed do a ‘sudo apt-get install vim’ install vim and proceed to typing the above command.
Vim is one of the most powerful text editors in the Linux Environment
consider mastering it. once inside the file you have to hit ‘i’ to enter
the insert mode. then copy the following code into the editor.
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#Gmail account
defaults
#change the location of the log file to any desired location.
logfile ~/msmtp.log
account gmail
auth on
host smtp.gmail.com
from <yourmail@gmail.com>
auth on
tls on
tls_trust_file /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Equifax_Secure_CA.crt
user <yourmail@gmail.com>
password <your-password>
port 587
#set gmail as your default mail server.
account default : gmail
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then press ESC to enter into the command mode in vim then type ‘:wq’ to
save and quit the editor. Now if you do a ‘ls -al’ you should see the
file in your home directory.
Step3 : Now this is lame.. any one who has access to
you computer could open this file to see your password. So you have to
modify the access permit for this file to the root only (you). So type
the following command
For more details see manual page of chmod.
Step4 : Now we have configured the gmail settings
and your computer should not have any troubles talking to the remote
server. We have to set up a command-line email program to talk to
the mail-server. So install mailx.
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sudo apt-get install heirloom-mailx
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Step5 : Now configure Mailx by creating a file called ‘.mailrc’ in your home directory.
follow the same procedure as in step2 to copy the following code into the newly created text file.
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set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"
set message-sendmail-extra-arguments="-a gmail"
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This should be enough to set up gmail to work form the command line. If
you are having any problems with the above procedure leave a comment and
I will get back to you shortly.
How to use it?
Type this command and hit enter.
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mail -s "subject" -a "attachment-if-any" "receiver@some-domain.com"
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Now you have to type your message here.
then hit enter and come to a new line and press CTRL+D you should see
a EOT at the line this indicates that you have successfully sent the
mail. The -a < attachment > is completely optional so you
can omit it. you can also use IO redirection operators in in linux to
transfer the contents of a file into a mail like,
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mail -s "subject" "receiver@some-domain.com" < message.txt
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This should send the contents of the text file to the receiver. If you
are really concerned about your privacy then you have to become the
superuser and perform the above steps in the root home directory.
