sending mail from terminal after a script

Mark3D: This is probably a rather different question than the OP, FWIW... Particularly given you're probably using Cocoa based on that NSTask spawn reference. If you are working in Cocoa, I'd probably use a framework and not spawn off some bash or Perl or other scripted code and deal with the somewhat sketchy error handling that can result from the NSTask approach... For some available code, see the ED Frameworks, this discussion, the libmailcore framework, and maybe this, this or maybe this over at StackOverflow There are probably other frameworks around, and I'd be very surprised if there wasn't some generic C code around for SMTP submissions. I'd also suggest availing yourself of the Apple developer forums for programming questions, or the Apple mailing lists. The Apple mailing list archives are a gold-mine of code, too. While we do see some programming questions around here, but there are far more in these other areas.

/usr/local/bin/sendEmail -q -o message-charset=utf-8 
-f "Tony <tony@gmail.com>" 
-t tony2@gmail.com 
-s smtp.gmail.com:587 
# -xu: username for SMTP authentication
-xu mygmailaddress@gmail.com 
# -xp: password for SMTP authentication
-xp mygmailpassword 
-u "My Script Completed" 
-m "My Script completed at: $(date)"

sendEmail works pretty well, but there are a couple of bugs.

1)

First of all, the version 1.5.6 by Brandm Zehm (thank you Brandom!) had a bug at the timeout parameter, easily fixable. The following command must have the "Timeout" parameter capitalized, and not lowercase (timeout, as I found). Fix it this way.

$SERVER = IO::Socket::INET->new( PeerAddr => $conf{'server'},

PeerPort => $conf{'port'},

LocalAddr => $conf{'bindaddr'},

Proto => 'tcp',

Autoflush => 1,

Timeout => $conf{'alarm'},

Then I added "-o timeout = 15" to the command line, and e.g. in case of wrong SMTP, the program properly exits at the timeout, after 15 seconds.

2)

Another bug I was not able to fix yet (please help) is that in case of wrong port, no mather the timeout, the program hangs up forever. For example I tried to send and email from my gmail account, using the SMTP smtp.gmail.com and the port 465 (which works fine with Entourage) and program hanged up. Using the port 25 everything worked well. I am puzzled. Is anybody who might help us here? Thank you.

Mark3D wrote:

.... I tried to send and email from my gmail account, using the SMTP smtp.gmail.com and the port 465 (which works fine with Entourage) and program hanged up. Using the port 25 everything worked well. I am puzzled. Is anybody who might help us here? Thank you.

I use -s smtp.gmail.com:587

What I mean is that if the user doesn't know the right port and tries to set an arbitrary port, e.g. 465, sendEmail hangs up forever. No matter whether the timeout is, e.g. 5 seconds. To avoid the hang up, I launch the procedure in a thread that invokes sendEmail through an NSTask. If the program hangs up, I let the user press a button to interrupt the NSTask. Then a NSTaskDidTerminateNotification calls my method which cleans everything. What a mess. So, if the timeout worked well even in case of a wrong port, returning after 5 seconds, I could have avoided all of this mess.

Mark3D wrote:

Please how can I change the code such a way it works on both OS X and Mavericks?

#!/usr/bin/perl5.12 -w

will work on both. (SendEmail hasn't been updated in awhile, and there was some SendEmail errors with perl v5.16.2 in Mavericks)

Thank you MrHoffman, I am going to check everything.

Incidentally, the Apple developer Mac forum lately didn't give me the answers I was looking for. It seems very hard to find a topic. The old mailing lists were much better (which I still use sometimes). StackOverflow is great too. Thanks again.

Also, with Mavericks, you need to change line 1 from #!/usr/bin/perl -w to #!/usr/bin/perl5.12 -w

Thank you Tony. I am going to check for that. I do not know Pearl, but I know C, C++ and ObjectiveC.

Please how can I change the code such a way it works on both OS X and Mavericks?