Sending email in HTML format directly from filePro

Mon Dec 5 10:50:45 PST 2011

On 12/4/2011 10:40 PM, filePro List wrote:
> On 12/04/11 2:01 PM, Brian K. White wrote:
>> On 12/4/2011 1:05 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Bill Campbell"<bill at celestial.com>
>>>
>>>> On Sat, Dec 03, 2011, Larry Hoover wrote:
>>>>> I'm creating emails directly from filePro and sending them out via
>>>>> mutt
>>>>> in Linux. I am successful with plain text emails, but html format does
>>>>> not render in html. Has anyone done this? Can it be done? Is it a
>>>>> function of the mutt or sendmail?
>>>>
>>>> This sounds like you're not getting the proper mail headers and
>>>> MIME parts right.
>>>
>>> I don't believe that mutt knows *how* to original HTML emails.
>>>
>>> Larry needs to understand, if he doesn't already, that HTML email *must*
>>> be MIME multipart/alternative with a text/plain and a text/HTML part,
>>> and
>>> *should* have some useful content in the text/plain part to avoid
>>> pissing
>>> off recipients who cannot (or like me, choose not to) read HTML email.
>>>
>>> (There are good security reasons not to read HTML email...)
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> -- jra
>>
>> You can send a pure html email without any multipart mime just by
>> putting content-type: text/html in the regular mail headers.
>>
>> I don't know how to make mutt do it because I generate my emails
>> directly, including headers and feed them into sendmail, no mutt or
>> other mua.
>>
>> mutt is just a convenience to get attachements encoded into base64 and
>> generate a few lines of mime headers. You can do it yourself almost as
>> easily and get a lot more flexability, not to mention replacing an
>> external black box, mutt, with some filepro and/or shell code of your
>> own that will never change how it works except when you want it to, will
>> never not-work etc.
>>
>> Generate a text file test.eml that looks like this, not including the
>> "--------":
>>
>> --------
>> To: larry at hoovercs.com
>> From: larry at hoovercs.com
>> Subject: test message
>> Content-Type: text/html
>>
>> <html><body>
>> This is a<b>bold</b> new test.
>> </body></html>
>> --------
>>
>> Now feed this file into "sentmail -ti" (it usually doesn't matter what
>> MTA you really have, smail, qmail, postfix, mmdf, or actual sendmail,
>> they all have a program or symlink called "sendmail" and all takes the
>> most common sendmail arguments.
>>
>> sendmail -ti< test.eml
>>
>> That's it.
>> Just cut&paste the thing above and try it right in a shell session.
>>
>> The sweet trick for filepro is to take regular old print output and
>> print it to a file with nocodes, that stick it into a minimal file like
>> above with only the<pre></pre> tag around the whole thing.
>>
>> --------
>> To: larry at hoovercs.com
>> From: larry at hoovercs.com
>> Subject: test message
>> Content-Type: text/html
>>
>> <html><body><pre>
>> (entire filepro form printed with nocodes)
>> </pre></body></html>
>> --------
>>
> Thanks to all responses. When I do what Brian says above, it hangs in
> the sendmail queue when sent directly via sendmail -it. When done via
> mutt with" "mutt -F /muttrc -s html larry at hoovercs.com < testmail", it
> sends the email out immediately, but arrives in plain text and looks
> like this (without the dashes):
>
> -------------------------
> To: larry at hoovercs.com
> From: larry at hoovercs.com
> Subject: test message
> Content-Type: text/html
>
> <html><body>
> This is a <b>bold</b> new test.
> </body></html>
> -------------------------
> .
>

That result from mutt is entirely expected since you used an MUA (mutt) 
to generate the mail headers and so everything in testmail was just body 
text, and not parsed by any of the mail servers or final client.
So of course it's not interpreted as html. The content-type line is just 
meaningless body text instead of being part of the actual headers.

There are any number of reasons the direct sendmail didn't work because 
there are any number of ways to configure, and misconfigure, mail 
spoolers, servers, and clients.

I intentionally didn't get into any of that and just assumed you had a 
working local server config as a base starting point. The fact that you 
can send with mutt doesn't mean much because for all I know maybe you 
have mutt configured to use some external mail server directly instead 
of configuring the local mail server to use that same external mail 
server as a smart host. I don't know, could be any number of things like 
that.

There are debugging options you can add to the sendmail command line to 
dump a lot of verbose messages that should tell you why it's hanging or 
what it's trying to do while it's hanging.

Also consult the docs for whatever mail server you have installed and 
verify that "sendmail -ti" does something that makes sense in context. 
-t and -i are pretty standard options but it's still possible your mail 
server doesn't understand them or uses them to mean something else.
For that matter, maybe you just need to seperate them into "-t -i" 
instead of "-ti"
The reason I specified them is because:
-i     When reading a message from standard input, don't treat a line 
with only a . character as the end of input.
-t     Extract recipients from message headers.

This means it reads all data till end of file and you don't need to add 
a special end-of-email line which is a single dot, and that if by chance 
the email happened to have a line with a single dot, it wouldn't end the 
email right there.

And it means you don't have to worry about putting subject and 
destination stuff on the command line, the command line can be fixed 
always the same, maybe inside a script, and the To: address comes from 
the mail file itself.

If "man sendmail" on your box doesn't show that, then adjust as implied 
by whatever your "man sendmail" does say.

I can't figure it all out for you, I can only tell you it's a definitely 
working method, and working in general for anyone, not just by luck 
working for me the way mutt seems to be by luck working for you.
You have to take that hint and figure out the details for your own box.

-- 
bkw