The mail command hangs on "Cc:" for mail

Question

For some reason, when I send mail with mail -s 'test email' tomyrealemail@myrealwebsite.com It prints out Cc: after I press enter and I can't do anything. I tried pressing . and it still is stuck. I'm trying to setup Amazon SES on Ubuntu

Answer 1

It is not hung. It is waiting for you to type in your message. Normally you can just send a command line email like:

echo "This is a test message" | mail -s 'test email' tomyrealemail@myrealwebsite.com

But if you just do mail -s 'test email' tomyrealemail@myrealwebsite.com the next part will be the Cc: or Carbon Copy email. If none, just press Enter.

Then just type in whatever body to the message you want to send, then as soon as you are done press Enter, then press Ctrl+D to send the message.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

You can just put '< /dev/null' ate the end of your command like this:

mail -s 'test email' tomyrealemail@myrealwebsite.com < /dev/null

It will send your message without any body.