Change the “From:” address in Unix “mail”

Question

Sending a message from the Unix command line using mail TO_ADDR results in an email from $USER@$HOSTNAME. Is there a way to change the \"From:\" ad

Answer 1

In my version of mail ( Debian linux 4.0 ) the following options work for controlling the source / reply addresses

• the -a switch, for additional headers to apply, supplying a From: header on the command line that will be appended to the outgoing mail header
• the $REPLYTO environment variable specifies a Reply-To: header

so the following sequence

export REPLYTO=cms-replies@example.com
mail -aFrom:cms-sends@example.com -s 'Testing'

The result, in my mail clients, is a mail from cms-sends@example.com, which any replies to will default to cms-replies@example.com

NB: Mac OS users: you don't have -a , but you do have $REPLYTO

NB(2): CentOS users, many commenters have added that you need to use -r not -a

NB(3): This answer is at least ten years old(1), please bear that in mind when you're coming in from Google.

Answer 2

Plus it's good to use -F option to specify Name of sender.

Something like this:

mail -s "$SUBJECT" $MAILTO -- -F $MAILFROM -f ${MAILFROM}@somedomain.com

Or just look at available options: http://www.courier-mta.org/sendmail.html

Answer 3

The answers provided before didn't work for me on CentOS5. I installed mutt. It has a lot of options. With mutt you do this this way:

export EMAIL=myfrom@example.com
export REPLYTO=myreplyto@example.com
mutt -s Testing chris@example.org

Answer 4

this worked for me

echo "hi root"|mail -rsawrub@testingdomain.org -s'testinggg' root

Answer 5

None of the above solutions are working for me...

#!/bin/bash

# Message
echo "My message" > message.txt

# Mail
subject="Test"
mail_header="From: John Smith <john.smith@example.com>"
recipients="recipient@example.com"

#######################################################################
cat message.txt | mail -s "$subject" -a "$mail_header" -t "$recipients"

Answer 6

It's also possible to set both the From name and from address using something like:

 echo test | mail -s "test" example@example.com -- -F'Some Name<example2@example.com>' -t

For some reason passing -F'Some Name' and -fexample2@example.com doesn't work, but passing in the -t to sendmail works and is "easy".