Sending Email from the Command Line with cURL

Let’s assume that you had a RFC 5822 formatted file named mail.txt as follows:

From: Some Sender <some.sender@gmail.com>
To: Some Recipient <some.recipient@example.com>
Subject: Saying Hello
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2023 04:15:06 -0100
Message-ID: <1234@local.machine.example>

This is a message just to say hello.
So, "Hello".

You can forward this to a email recipient using Google’s SMTP with the following curl command provided you have a Google app password:

$ curl --url 'smtps://smtp.gmail.com:465' --ssl-reqd \
 --mail-from 'some.sender@gmail.com' \ 
 --mail-rcpt 'some.recipient@example.com' \
 --upload-file mail.txt \
 --user 'some.sender@gmail.com:your-gmail-app-password'

Output should be something like this:

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100    12    0     0  100    12      0     10  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:--    10
$

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