CentOS - Sep 2020 - Conversion from Centos 5 to Centos 7 & mailx changes

Stephen and Kenneth,

Thank you very much for your help.

I tried 'MAILRC=/dev/nul' which I put in /etc/mail.rc as

'set MAILRC=/dev/null'

But I did not identify that this changed any behavior.

The link below was very helpful Stephen thank you for your kindness in digging
this out for
me.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-send-e-mail-alerts-on-a-centos-vps-for-system-monitoring

In the end the above link gave me a grammar and syntax that worked, but it is
requiring a
change in every line of code that the 'mail' command had been used.  the
following syntax
and grammer gave me what I needed.

echo | mail -s "Subject" -r from at address -q /loc/to/body.txt email
at address

Thank you again for your help!!!

Greg

On Sat, 5 Sep 2020 at 10:19, Gregory P. Ennis <PoMec at pomec.net> wrote:
>
> Stephen and Kenneth,
>
> Thank you very much for your help.
>
> I tried 'MAILRC=/dev/nul' which I put in /etc/mail.rc as
>
> 'set MAILRC=/dev/null'
>
>
No that is meant to be a shell environment variable so that it does not try
to read /etc/mail.rc.. if you have it in /etc/mail.rc its not going to help
any.

> But I did not identify that this changed any behavior.
>
> The link below was very helpful Stephen thank you for your kindness in
> digging this out for
> me.
>
>
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-send-e-mail-alerts-on-a-centos-vps-for-system-monitoring
>
> In the end the above link gave me a grammar and syntax that worked, but it
> is requiring a
> change in every line of code that the 'mail' command had been used.
the
> following syntax
> and grammer gave me what I needed.
>
> echo | mail -s "Subject" -r from at address -q /loc/to/body.txt
email at address
>
> Thank you again for your help!!!
>
> Greg
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

On Sat, 5 Sep 2020 at 10:19, Gregory P. Ennis <PoMec at pomec.net> wrote:
> 
> Stephen and Kenneth,
> 
> Thank you very much for your help.
> 
> I tried 'MAILRC=/dev/null' which I put in /etc/mail.rc as
> 
> 'set MAILRC=/dev/null'
> 
> 
No that is meant to be a shell environment variable so that it does not try
to read /etc/mail.rc.. if you have it in /etc/mail.rc its not going to help
any.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stephen, 

Unfortunately, the syntax below that I thought was working did not work from a
cron job :

"echo | mail -s 'Subject' -r from at address -q /loc/to/body.txt
email at address"

Also the addition of environment variables did not work with a cron job.  I was
not able to
get any change in behavior by adding an environment variable as
'MAILRC=/dev.null'.  I
found an additional reference using the 'MAILRC=/dev/null mailx' and
this did not work
either.  

There was some references of adding additional environment variables which also
did not
work :
'LC_NAME=fr_FR.UTF-8'
'LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8'
The purpose of this as I understood the reference was a faulty interpretation of
accents as
control characters 
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10343106/linux-mail-file-log-has-content-type-application-octet-stream-a-noname-attac

I finally found two things that worked :

#1. Your reference to the use cat with the -v switch did work with a cron job,
and this is
the only way I could get mailx to not base64 encode the file. 

"cat -v log/logfile.log | mail -s 'here is a log file' 'person
at example.com'"

#2. Use of mutt which had the exact same syntax and grammar as mail in 98% of my
code

"mutt -s 'Test the dump' Name at domain.com < /u/3/dump"

The easiest fix for me ended up installing mutt and changing the symbolic link
of
mail->mailx
to
mail->mutt

I hope this is helpful to others that have the same problem with mailx.


Greg Ennis