Change the From address in Unix mail

Question

Sending a message from the Unix command line using mail TO ADDR results in an email from  USER  HOSTNAME  Is there a way to change the  From   address inserted by mail   For the record  I m using GNU Mailutils 1 1 1 2 on Ubuntu  but I ve seen the same behavior with Fedora and RHEL     EDIT      mail -s Testing chris example org                                                                   Cc   From  foo bar org  Testing     yields   Subject  Testing To   lt chris example org gt  X-Mailer  mail  GNU Mailutils 1 1  Message-Id   lt E1KdTJj-00025z-RK localhost gt  From   lt chris localhost gt  Date  Wed  10 Sep 2008 13 17 23 -0400  From  foo bar org  Testing   The  From  foo bar org  line is part of the message body  not part of the header

User · Accepted Answer

In my version of mail   Debian linux 4 0   the following options work for controlling the source   reply addresses   the -a switch  for additional headers to apply  supplying a From  header on the command line that will be appended to the outgoing mail header the  REPLYTO environment variable specifies a Reply-To  header   so the following sequence  export REPLYTO cms-replies example com mail -aFrom cms-sends example com -s  Testing    The result  in my mail clients  is a mail from cms-sends example com  which any replies to will default to cms-replies example com  NB  Mac OS users  you don t have -a   but you do have  REPLYTO  NB 2   CentOS users  many commenters have added that you need to use -r not -a  NB 3   This answer is at least ten years old 1   please bear that in mind when you re coming in from Google

User · Answer

On CentOS this worked for me    echo  email body    mail -s  Subject here  -r from email address email address to

User · Answer

None of the above solutions are working for me        bin bash    Message echo  My message   gt  message txt    Mail subject  Test  mail header  From  John Smith  lt john smith example com gt   recipients  recipient example com                                                                           cat message txt   mail -s   subject  -a   mail header  -t   recipients

User · Answer

I derived this from all the above answers  Nothing worked for me when I tried each one of them  I did lot of trail and error by combining all the above answers and concluded on this  I am not sure if this works for you but it worked for me on Ununtu 12 04 and RHEL 5 4   echo  This is the body of the mail    mail -s  This is the subject    lt receiver-id1 email com gt   lt receiver-id2 email com gt   -- -F   lt SenderName gt   -f   lt from-id email com gt     One can send the mail to any number of people by adding any number of receiver id s and the mail is sent by SenderName from from-id email com  Hope this helps

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Plus it s good to use -F option to specify Name of sender   Something like this   mail -s   SUBJECT   MAILTO -- -F  MAILFROM -f   MAILFROM  somedomain com   Or just look at available options  http   www courier-mta org sendmail html

User · Answer

On Centos 5 3 I m able to do   mail -s  Subject  user address com -- -f from address com  lt  body   The double dash stops mail from parsing the -f argument and passes it along to sendmail itself

User · Answer

GNU mailutils s  mail  command doesn t let you do this  easily at least   But If you install  heirloom-mailx   its mail command  mailx  has the  -r  option to override the default   USER  HOSTNAME  from field   echo  Hello there    mail -s  testing  -r sender company com recipient company com   Works for  mailx  but not  mail       ls -l  usr bin mail lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2010-12-23 08 33  usr bin mail -   etc alternatives mail   ls -l  etc alternatives mail lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 2010-12-23 08 33  etc alternatives mail -   usr bin heirloom-mailx

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I don t know if it s the same with other OS  but in OpenBSD  the mail command has this syntax   mail to-addr     -sendmail-options       sendmail has -f option where you indicate the email address for the FROM  field  The following command works for me   mail recepient example com -f from example com

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On Debian 7 I was still unable to correctly set the sender address using answers from this question   would always be the hostname of the server  but resolved it this way   Install heirloom-mailx  apt-get install heirloom-mailx   ensure it s the default   update-alternatives --config mailx   Compose a message   mail -s  Testing from  amp  replyto  -r  sender  lt sender example com gt   -S replyto  sender example com  recipient example net  lt   lt  echo  Test message

User · Answer

Thanks BEAU  mail -s  Subject  user address com -- -f from address com   I just found this and it works for me  The man pages for mail 8 1 on CentOS 5 doesn t mention this  For -f option  the man page says      -f     Read messages from the file named by the file operand instead of the system mailbox    See  also  folder    If  no  file operand is specified  read messages from mbox instead of the system mailbox    So anyway this is great to find  thanks

User · Answer

echo  test    mailx -r fake example com -s  test  email example com   It works in OpenBSD

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this worked for me   echo  hi root  mail -rsawrub testingdomain org -s testinggg  root

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The answers provided before didn t work for me on CentOS5  I installed mutt  It has a lot of options  With mutt you do this this way   export EMAIL myfrom example com export REPLYTO myreplyto example com mutt -s Testing chris example org

User · Answer

Here are some options    If you have privelige enough  configure sendmail to do rewrites with the generics table Write the entire header yourself  or mail it to yourself  save the entire message with all headers  and re-edit  and send it with rmail from the command line Send directly with sendmail  use the  -f  command line flag and don t include your  From   line in your message   These aren t all exactly the same  but I ll leave it to you look into it further   On my portable  I have sendmail authenticating as a client to an outgoing mail server and I use generics to make returning mail come to another account   It works like a charm  I aggregate incoming mail with fetchmail

User · Answer

echo  body    mail -S from address foo com  Hello   -S lets you specify lots of string options  by far the easiest way to modify headers and such

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It s also possible to set both the From name and from address using something like    echo test   mail -s  test  example example com -- -F Some Name lt example2 example com gt   -t   For some reason passing -F Some Name  and -fexample2 example com doesn t work  but passing in the -t to sendmail works and is  easy

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What allowed me to have a custom reply-to address on an Ubuntu 16 04 with UTF-8 encoding and a file attachment   Install the mail client   sudo apt-get install heirloom-mailx   Edit the SMTP configuration   sudo vim  etc ssmtp ssmtp conf mailhub smtp gmail com 587 FromLineOverride YES AuthUser     gmail com AuthPass     UseSTARTTLS YES   Send the mail   sender  send domain com  recipient  recipient domain com  zipfile  results file zip  today  date    d-  m-  Y  mailSubject  My subject on the   today read -r -d    mailBody  lt  lt  EOM Find attached the zip file   Regards  EOM mail -s   mailSubject  -r  Name  lt  sender gt   -S replyto   sender  -a  zipfile  recipient  lt   lt  echo  mailBody

User · Answer

On CentOS 5 5  the easiest way I ve found to set the default from domain is to modify the hosts file  If your hosts file contains your WAN public IP address  simply modify the first hostname listed for it  For example  your hosts file may look like             11 22 33 44 localhost default-domain whatever-else com          To make it send from whatever-else com  simply modify it so that whatever-else com is listed first  for example             11 22 33 44 whatever-else com localhost default-domain           I can t speak for any other distro  or even version of CentOS  but in my particular case  the above works perfectly

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mail -s    echo -e  This is the subject nFrom  Paula  lt johny paula com gt  n Reply-to  1232564 yourserver com nContent-Type  text html n     milas josh gmail com  lt  htmlFileMessage txt   the above is my solution    any extra headers can be added just after the from and before the reply to   just make sure you know your headers syntax before adding them    this worked perfectly for me

[unix] Change the "From:" address in Unix "mail"

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