I am trying to send email to the outside world from the command line. Is this even possible or am I wasting my time?

You can use pine, the email client for the command line. Just issue "pine" in the command line.

I use pine usually. It is wonderful because you can secure shell (ssh)
to your mail machine from anywhere in the world and then run pine on it. It just works. Not all the GUI configuration nonsense that
can be a bear. Of course viewing attachments in pine is a pain in
the neck, but for text e-mail it's just great. Elm is another good
mail reader if for some reason pine isn't on your system.

One other thing to mention. If you are doing mail on your local machine, this assumes that all the mail daemons are running and configured properly. Otherwise, what you are really doing is secure shelling to another machine (the mailserver of your ISP) and running pine on that. This assumes that you have an ISP that gave you a linux shell account ... That isn't the default anymore, except still
at many universities.

Thanks for the responses................but we do not have an "in house" mail machine. We have an off site company that handles our mail for us, and they do not allow ssh, telnet etc...into their server. I knew this going in but my boss already promised the powers to be that we could do this, so I guess I am screwed. All I am wanting to do is send a simple text message to an outside address. We do not need to have mail coming back in, because all we are emailing are confirmations of shipments to our customers.

If they are selling a service, they ought to support their customers.
Is the outside company running an NT based server or is it Linux based. If Linux
based there is no reason on god's green earth you couldn't get a shell account.
Secure shell is SECURE. If Windows based ... ah well, I don't know.

Of course if your boss has his neck on the line now, just go to another ISP that
WILL give you a shell account. Talk him into trying it on an "experimental" basis.
It's $20 a month from Netcom or some such.

Good luck! Let us know how you do.

BTW -- YOu need puTTY on your Windows machine to give you a ssh to their mail server. (I assume you have a Windows machine in your office. If Linux, then ssh is native).

You can use nail to send mail through SMTP (which your mail server probably uses). Just put the below in a shell script, make it executable, and run it.
Call it whatever you would like. You should probably read the nail man pages to get an idea how it works. This assumes you have the nail package installed.

pine john@email.com < file...................

I had to configure pine to match my mail server even though they "Bellsouth" said I couldn't.!

Can I make Pine send me emails without any type of confirmation??

I want to prorgam pine through crontab, so the machine will have to do it all