I did a locate mailto on my Red Hat box, but found nothing. However, I have mail...I'd like use "mail" to send an email to myself from the command line. Is this possible? In other words, when you just install a recent Red Hat distro, does it come with the ability to go to the command line and type a simple string that will send an email to someone? Or do you always have to go through some major installation/configuration of sendmail or something like that?

A lot will depend on whether you are sending it to a user on the host machine, or out to the world. Usually, you need either a mail server set up, or to use something like pop3

However, for your question.

mail [username] is the syntax

example: mail joe
or
mail joe@somewhere.com

You will be prompted for a subject.

Yoiu can specify the subject right from the start also such as
mail -s "Some mail for you" joe@somewhere.com

You can also send the contents of a file as well.

mail -s "A message for you" joe@somewhere.com <some_file_name

Ah...I want to send it out to the world. That's much harder to get set up, isn't it?

As long as your nameservers are setup appropriately and that you have sendmail running then yes, you can send mail out to the world

-twantrd

Although this is known as 'Spam'

I know the chances of you believing me are not that great, but these emails are sent to our customers for shipment notifications. I need to be able to do non-text attachments for some of them because occasionally our customers will actually email a shipment label to someone. I have seen some code before for doing a binary attachment using Java, but it's a bit complicated. I would rather not install JavaMail for this one special case.

On Windows, our web app would use the Blat command line utility to send an email with an attachment. However, it seems like there's nothing that simple on Linux, or maybe I'm missing something...when I send an email with either Blat or Java code, I just connect to our ISP's SMTP server by setting it as the host, and then I can email all day long. I've tried to figure out how to do this with mutt or mail or something like that, but it seems like in order to do that I have to have a sendmail server running. But maybe I'm wrong--maybe mutt can run as long as you tell it what the SMTP server is (I just haven't figured out where to configure that).

When I try to send an email with mutt from the command line, it doesn't tell me there's an error, but I also never get the email...