Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

Name

metamail

Synopsis

                  metamail [options] [filename]

Normally invisible to users, metamail is used to send and display rich text or multimedia email using MIME typing metadata. Mail-reading programs normally call metamail to determine how to handle the data, but metamail can be called directly by developers who want to use it for their own mail software, or by system administrators and power users adding lines to their printcap files. Any argument passed to metamail that is not preceded by a hyphen ( -) is assumed to be the name of a file to read. If no filename is specified, standard input is assumed.

Options

-b

The message is not in RFC 822 format; treat as the body of the message. Requires -c.

-B

Display the message in the background, if noninteractive. Cannot be used with -p or -P.

-c type

Use the specified content type instead of the one in the headers.

-d

Don’t ask before running an interpreter to view the message. The default is to ask.

-e

Remove (“eat”) leading newlines in the message body. Useful for MH-format mail.

-f addr

Specify the name of the message sender. The default is to try to determine the name from the header.

-h

Specify that a message is to be printed. Automatically sets -d.

-m mailer

Specify the mail program to be called by metamail.

-p

If necessary, display the output one page at a time. The default is to pipe the output through more, but the environment variable METAMAIL_PAGER can be set to specify an alternative command. Use -p rather than piping the message ...