Hopefully, you have integrated premail into your mail client, and you won't have to invoke it from the command line. However, there may still be times when it is convenient to use premail from the command line.
The most basic use of premail is as a replacement for sendmail.
For example, you can send mail directly from the command line, as
follows (here, the >
represents the Unix prompt):
> premail -t
To: raph@cs.berkeley.edu ((sign))
Subject: premail bug report
Here's a bug in premail: ...
.
>
The -t
option specifies that the recipients are extracted
from the header fields (To:
, Cc:
, Bcc:
, and
the Resent-
variants of each). As in sendmail, you can
specify the recipients on the command line instead of using the
-t
option.
In addition, you can set configuration options from the command
line, using the +option=value
syntax. This is especially
useful with the debug option (see section
Debugging. For example, to show you what happens when formatting
mail for remailers, but not actually send the message:
> premail +debug=ry -t
To: raph@cs.berkeley.edu ((chain=1))
Subject: test of remailer
test
.
Chose chain exon
/usr/lib/sendmail -oi remailer\@remailer\.nl\.com << -eof-
To: remailer@remailer.nl.com
::
Encrypted: PGP
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- remailer@remailer.nl.com
::
Request-Remailing-To: raph@cs.berkeley.edu
##
Subject: test of remailer
test
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
-eof-
There is one configuration option that can only be set from the
command line in this fashion, which is the location of the preferences
file itself. The configuration option is preferences
, and the
default value is ~/.premail/preferences
.