Why does echo work through pipe but not cat with msmtp?

Question

This works:

echo "yada yada" | msmtp [email protected]

but not this:

cat yadayada.txt | msmtp [email protected]

which delivers the email with empty content.

Why does echo work through pipe but not cat with msmtp ?

Is your `yadayada.txt` formatted funny or have weird permissions? It works fine for me catting it out. — nerdwaller, Aug 07 '13 at 21:52
yadayada.txt has u:rw g:rw o:r and is a multiline file. sample content: === rsync start === 2013-08-07 20:58:01 === rsync stop === 2013-08-07 21:00:50 — user19496, Aug 07 '13 at 21:56
this worked: tr -d ':' < yadayada.txt | msmtp [email protected] — user19496, Aug 07 '13 at 22:26
':' was the culprit. thx @nerdwaller you pointed me in the right direction. — user19496, Aug 07 '13 at 22:27
That makes sense, since msmtp allows uses of something like `Subject: My subject line`. Good catch! — nerdwaller, Aug 07 '13 at 22:32

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 07 '13 at 22:38

msmtp seems to rely on a wellformed email message in the file being read.

Ex.

Subject: My subject line  
My body text

Since I don't care about Subject etc
(I'm sending an email when a logfile is modified using incron)

tr -d ':' < yadayada.txt | msmtp [email protected]

is a Q&D way to get the logfile content sent using msmtp.

1 Answers1