E-mail attachments constitute a surprisingly large and even unwieldy subject. The first clarification is to distinguish emission of e-mail with attachments, from its reception and interpretation. The Wiki page on the mime package focuses mostly on the latter.
10/31/2002: Roberto Mello provides the following example:
package require mime
package require smtp
set rcpts [open email-list.txt]
set files [lsort [glob *.JPG]]
set text "Ooops! Some of the pictures got mixed up in the last e-mail."
append text \n "Let's try this again." \
\n \n "Happy Halloween!" \
\n Your friendly MASA Villages Staff"
set i 0
while { [gets $rcpts rcpt] != -1 } {
set this_image [lindex $files $i]
# create an image and text
set imageT [mime::initialize -canonical \
"image/jpg; name=\"$this_image\"" -file $this_image]
set textT [mime::initialize -canonical text/plain -string $text]
# create a multipart containing both, and a timestamp
set multiT [mime::initialize -canonical multipart/mixed \
-parts [list $imageT $textT]]
# send it to some friends
puts "Sending to $rcpt: $this_image"
smtp::sendmessage $multiT \
-header [list From "Juliane Mello <jmello@usu>"] \
-header [list To $rcpt] \
-header [list Subject "Ooops!"]
incr i
}The variety of ways to transmit e-mail attachments with Tcl is large. CL keeps a few models in [L1 ].
One of the reasons for active interest in the range of possibilities is typical for Tcl: one wants to compensate for various constraints. mime had severe flaws before tcllib 0.8 (and still has other errors--more on that, later) and is essentially unreliable with Tcl before 8.2. CL frequently needs to set up quick e-mail operations on hosts equipped with old interpreters; 7.6, for example, in the case of a client met in January 2002. For older interpreters, it's best to enlist outside help, as with
set tmpfile /tmp/abc[pid]
set subject "This is the subject line."
exec /usr/local/bin/mpack -s $subject -o $tmpfile $standard_name
set To {The distribution list}
set recipients "[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]"
set recipients [join $recipients ,]
exec $sendmail -t << \
"To: ($To)
Bcc: $recipients
[exec cat $tmpfile]"
Mutt: Someone had contributed a mutt example that was not correct (mutt tossed back a "bad usage" message). CL's taken the liberty of simplifying the example from four lines to one, in the process of correcting it:
exec mutt -s $subject -a $attachment $to << $body
Other useful external Unix utilities include pine and uuencode [give examples].
CMM: Can anyone enlighten on the proper way to unencode incoming binary attachments for output to disk?
FP: Another useful Unix utility for this job is UUDeview [L2 ]
uuenview -b -m [email protected] -s "The Subject" filename