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Comment by caludio | Hacker News Reader

I hope tomorrow I'll see an even more useful article on sending email from the command line! Wow. /sarcasm

You know, sending email from the command line isn't quite trivial, if you want to send in anything other than ascii. Telnet[0] to port 25 can be a lot of fun (alternatively openssl s_client[1] -starttls smtp ...).

For anyone not already familiar with this I'd recommend having a look at heirloom mailx[2].

Note, you can of course also pipe stuff to "/usr/bin/sendmail -t", which I'm sure was the thing claudio was alluding to.

[0] See eg: http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/SMTP,_testing_via_Telne... vs: http://www.pcvr.nl/tcpip/smtp_sim.htm

[1] http://www.madboa.com/geek/openssl/#cs-smtp

[2] http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/mailx.html

I'd be interested to know exactly what you mean (I usually don't really get sarcasm). It seems that you think this advice is useless, or that people never use the command line, or something, but I don't really know what.

Could you be more specific? I find it useful to understand different points of view.

Thanks

Site is "Hacker News", not "How-tos for dummies", last time I checked. Do we really need this kind of stuff in home page? Hardly so. What about an article on how to create a three columns layout with CSS? Or how to edit a file using a text editor? Come on... how to use curl? Really?

Not every hacker knows every tool well. I wouldn't sweat it.

Seeing that 200+ people upvoted, it would suggests that enough people found it useful.

I will admit that I am not familiar with curl and I found this helpful and enlightening. If you don't find it useful, then just move on. We come to HKN to learn about the other aspects that we are not familiar with. Just be mindful that not everyone have the same expertise.

From the guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

My guess is that caludio believes that good hackers would not find this article interesting. I somewhat agree, as I feel that article adds little to what can already be found in the cURL man page. Having said that, I do think there is worth in having good examples, which this article certainly did.

It's a little disheartening to see this at the top of HN though.

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