How can I send e-mail in C?

Question

I'm just wondering how can I send email using C? I Googled it a little bit, but could not find anything proper.

Answer 1

Run sendmail and pass the e-mail to its standard input (on unix-like systems), or use some SMTP client library to connect to SMTP mail server.

Answer 2

The most obvious choices:

1. Use system() to call an existing command-line tool to send mail. Not very portable (requires an external tool with a given calling syntax, etc) but very easy to implement.
2. Use some library.
3. Implement SMTP yourself, and talk directly to a mail server. A lot of work.

Answer 3

On Unix like systems you can use system and sendmail as follows:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main() {

        char cmd[100];  // to hold the command.
        char to[] = "[email protected]"; // email id of the recepient.
        char body[] = "SO rocks";    // email body.
        char tempFile[100];     // name of tempfile.

        strcpy(tempFile,tempnam("/tmp","sendmail")); // generate temp file name.

        FILE *fp = fopen(tempFile,"w"); // open it for writing.
        fprintf(fp,"%s\n",body);        // write body to it.
        fclose(fp);             // close it.

        sprintf(cmd,"sendmail %s < %s",to,tempFile); // prepare command.
        system(cmd);     // execute it.

        return 0;
}

I know its ugly and there are several better ways to do it...but it works :)

Answer 4

You can use the mail command also.

Inside the C program using the mail command and system function you can send the mail to the user.

 system("mail -s subject  address < filename")

  Example
 system ("mail -s test [email protected] < filename")

Note: The file should be exists. If you want to type the content, yiu can type the content inside the file, then send that file to receiver.