Thread: need some help on email sending in C programming

Hey

itslike this, we're working on this project a evaluation program for students and teachers to evaluate done courses etc, and one of the demands was that the program would send a mail to the teacher running the course when 90% of the registered students had done a evaluation, thing is I cant find anything on how to send a mail through C-code, I've tried custom System(" ") commands with pine and sendmail, but none will work, sendmail requiers root, and that means entering a password etc, pine requires you to type a msg every time, also tried "sudo" commando, and still requires you to enter a password. I really need your help and I would really appreciate it.

A guy in need of help.

ps ..

We're running linux red hat.

What about 'mail', 'Mail' or 'mailx' via a system("") call?

I seem to remember something like this...
system( "mail -s subject user@host < message.txt" );

I would be mildly surprised if say pine did not have a non-interactive mode - getting programs to send email is a fairly common thing.

Don't mess with sockets and crap! It's really a very simple problem.

Sendmail doesn't require root, of course it doesn't since the mail system and each user calls it! I use sendmail from my C programs all the time.

Find out where sendmail is on your system.
Typically /usr/lib/sendmail but sometimes /usr/bin/sendmail or /usr/sbin/sendmail (sometimes it's linked from one to the other so it doesn't matter).

To avoid dangerous security situations where an argument from a user (passed from a web page for example) includes escape sequences that can execute arbitrary commands (a BAD THING) don't pass any user arguments to sendmail. Instead, call sendmail with the -t option, this means you will have the recipient specified in the file. So, write a temp file with the email header and body in it, and then pass it to sendmail.

The temp message file should look like this:

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: This is my email program

This is the message body blah blah blah


NOTE: The temp message file includes the actual MIME headers that sendmail expects, so it's important that they are written in the file just like that -- Initial capital letter, space, colon, etc. Also, the blank line after the Subject: is very important -- the blank line signals the end
of the MIME header and the beginning of the body.

Once your program has generated the temp file, use a system call to sendmail to push it out the door:

system( "/usr/lib/sendmail -t < mytempfile.txt" );

Note the "less than" sign means for sendmail to
read its input from that file.

For the system() call, make sure you #include <stdlib.h>

Thats it -- let me know if it works out for you.

Walter

To Walter:

Tnx for the help, it works ! I dunno how many hours I've spent trying to find a solution that would work. thanks all you guy who helped me out on this one.