Sending email attachment using uuencode and mailx

Question

I'm trying to get a system on my home network to send an image (.png) via email. The closest I have gotten is this:

uuencode -m snapshot.png snapshot.png | mailx -r "[email protected]" -s "Snapshot" -S smtp=smtp.myremoteserver.net [email protected]

Which gets the mail to me, but the output leaves a bit to be desired...

begin-base64 755 snapshot.png
AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8A
AAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAA
AP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA
(well, you get the idea...)
AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8A
AAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAA
AP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/AAAA/wAAAP8AAAD/
====

The trouble is, I HAVE to send through smtp.myremoteserver.net. But the image file isn't getting decoded by my mail client (I've tried in Thunderbird and in various webmail interfaces, same result). Is there a better way that actually works?

Update: Just for the fun of it, I ran this:

uuencode -m snapshot.png snapshot.png > coded.txt

And upon decoding it, I got a scrambled, unviewable mess. So the problem must be with the uuencoding.

Answer 1

At my old job, the mailx program had an attachment option built in -a.

From http://linux.die.net/man/1/mailx:

-a file

Attach the given file to the message.

Then you don't have to worry about the uuencode stuff. I believe you can add multiple -a options to send multiple attachments as well.

Not sure which version this option appeared though (the servers at my new job don't have it).