Sending binary e-mail attachments from the command line with mutt

E-mailing a binary e-mail attachment from a Linux server has always been difficult for me because I never found a reliable method to get it done. I’ve used uuencode to pipe data into mail on various systems but the attachment is often unreadable by many e-mail clients.

Someone finally showed me a simple, fool-proof method to send binary attachments reliably from various Linux systems:

echo "Cheeseburger" | mutt -s "OHAI!" -a lolcat.jpg -- recipient@domain.com

If you e-mail doesn’t arrive, remember to consider the size of the file that you’re sending and the restrictions of the receiver’s e-mail server. Keep in mind that encoding the binary attachment will cause the size of the e-mail to creep up a bit more (about 1.37x plus a little extra with Base64).