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:" address inserted by mail?

For the record, I'm using GNU Mailutils 1.1/1.2 on Ubuntu (but I've seen the same behavior with Fedora and RHEL).

[EDIT]

$ mail -s Testing [email protected]                                                                  
Cc: 
From: [email protected]

Testing
.

yields

Subject: Testing
To: <[email protected]>
X-Mailer: mail (GNU Mailutils 1.1)
Message-Id: <E1KdTJj-00025z-RK@localhost>
From: <chris@localhost>
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:17:23 -0400

From: [email protected]

Testing

The "From: [email protected]" line is part of the message body, not part of the header.

Answer 1

Here are some options:

• If you have privelige enough, configure sendmail to do rewrites with the generics table

• Write the entire header yourself (or mail it to yourself, save the entire message with all headers, and re-edit, and send it with rmail from the command line

• Send directly with sendmail, use the "-f" command line flag and don't include your "From:" line in your message

These aren't all exactly the same, but I'll leave it to you look into it further.

On my portable, I have sendmail authenticating as a client to an outgoing mail server and I use generics to make returning mail come to another account. It works like a charm. I aggregate incoming mail with fetchmail.

Answer 2

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 [email protected]
mail -aFrom:[email protected] -s 'Testing'

The result, in my mail clients, is a mail from [email protected], which any replies to will default to [email protected]

Answer 3

for me -a is not working ..any other alternative...pls let me know

Answer 4

this worked for me

echo "hi root"|mail [email protected] -s'testinggg' root

Answer 5

On Centos 5.3 I'm able to do:

mail -s "Subject" [email protected] -- -f [email protected] < body

The double dash stops mail from parsing the -f argument and passes it along to sendmail itself.