Using "email" command in Cygwin [closed]

Question

I am trying to use Cygwin to send an e-mail from the command line. This is what I am putting in:

email -f [email protected] -s "This is a test" -b [email protected]

I get this error message:

/bin/sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: No such file or directory

I created a folder in /usr/lib called "sendmail", and now I get this:

/bin/sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: is a directory

Can someone please give me a step-by-step on how to send an email from Cygwin? Like how to set it up and everything? I have looked everywhere and I am about ready to tear my hair out.

EDIT: Thanks for your responses guys. This is how I finally got it to work.

bash.exe -c "echo  -e 'To: [email protected]\nSubject: mySQL Upload\nSQL files from machines uploaded to log table successfully.' | sendmail -f [email protected] [email protected]"

Even though Cygwin was in my Windows path, it couldn't recognize it, so I had to run bash.exe directly and say "do this command as a Linux command". The echo is what is constructing the email itself. The \n characters separate it into "To", "Subject" and Body.

Answer 1

Apparently, email is a program that lets you submit an email message (a Mail Submission Agent) that relies on another program to actually send the message (a Mail Transfer Agent).

I enabled this on my Cygwin installation last week. I am not using email but mutt, one of the alternatives Cygwin offers (see its package list). I use mutt not only to submit the mail to be sent, but also to read it; it's a Mail User Agent (see some screenshots).

Like email, mutt relies on a Mail Transfer Agent to send mail, so I had to install one. On Linux, popular choices are sendmail and postfix; but they do far more than you need and Cygwin doesn't offer them as packages. It does offer exim and ssmtp.

I installed the ssmtp package and ran the ssmtp-config utility. You have to make some decisions here. You must know which SMTP server you can use and whether you need any special configuration to communicate with it.

By the way, ssmtp does install an executable called sendmail, which is not the original sendmail, but behaves like it for the purposes you need it for.