How to send/receive local emails in Linux Mint/VirtualBox

Thursday, July 25, 2024 at 7:36 PM | 6 min read

Last modified on Wednesday, August 5, 2026 at 7:49 PM

#command line, #linux, #linux mint, #local mail, #postfix, #mail command, #mailx command, #mailutils, #terminal, #virtualbox

Mail flying through the air

Photo by Edoardo Tommasini on pexels.com

Table of Contents

I have begun acquainting myself with cron jobs in Linux, and I want to be able to send myself local emails inside Linux Mint/VirtualBox to see if the cron job was successful or not. It is actually quite easy, but not so easy to find all the correct information. But I finally did!

Installing postfix and mailutils

At first I thought that I should send an email from Linux Mint Terminal to my actual Gmail email. I installed postfix for mail transfer and then mailutils because I was trying out the mail command and needed to install mailutils if I wanted to use it.

mailx vs mail command

After some investigation, I found it to be too complicated and not even necessary. There is a simple mail user agent program called mailx, available via the mailutils package.

I ended up using the mail command, but mailx is used in the same way. In fact, I have used them interchangeably. They are both available with the mailutils package, which is what I installed in order to be able to use the mail command. What is interesting is that mail and mailx are two separate commands, and they have their own bin. But they basically do the same thing.

When I did try to send an email to my Gmail account, of course it did not work. I don't think I could accomplish that these days from a local email address inside my Linux Mint/VirtualBox instance. So that's why I decided to stick with this approach since I am working inside a virtual machine anyway. It will be interesting to find out if I can send an email to Gmail in macOS when I set up cron jobs there. That's for another time!

Using the echo and mail commands to send a local email

I used the following command to send myself a local email with the mail (and/or mailx) command from Terminal:

echo "My first test message" | mail -s "My first test message subject line" maria@maria-VirtualBox
# or
echo "My first test message" | mailx -s "My first test message subject line" maria@maria-VirtualBox

Using the mail or mailx command to view my local inbox

And then to view my local mail/mailx inbox, I run the following in Terminal:

mail
# or
mailx

And when I hit the Enter key, Terminal returns:

"/var/mail/maria": 1 message 1 unread
>U 1 Maria            Thu Jul 25 16:53  17/601  My first test message sub...
?

Deleting a message from my local inbox

If I want to delete the message, I type the following after the ? prompt:

? d 1

Then hitting the Enter key followed by Control key + D key exits me out of the mail/mailx program back to the shell prompt. But before I actually exit out, Terminal responds with:

Held 0 messages in /var/mail/maria

The -s flag stands for subject. There are other options to choose from with mailx. In order to learn more, check out man mailx in Terminal.

Sending emails to other users on the local network

I can also send emails to other users on the system. For example, I could send an email to user magdala. Then I could take advantage of things like attaching a file to the email. Let's say I run the following in Terminal:

cat /home/maria/Desktop/history.txt | mail -s "Hi Magdala, just checking in!" magdala@maria-VirtualBox

Since I am sending the email via Terminal, and it is being received by user magdala also via Terminal, I have to stick to what the CLI (Command Line Interface or Terminal) understands. So for the Terminal (bash specifically) to interpret the contents of my history.txt file properly, cat outputs the file's contents, and the pipe feeds that as mailx's stdin.

Sending a copy of an email to myself using the cat command

If I wanted to send a copy of the email to myself I could do the following:

cat /home/maria/Desktop/history.txt | mail -s "Hi Magdala, just checking in!" magdala@maria-VirtualBox maria@maria-VirtualBox

And if the user magdala wants to save the contents to a file, she can copy it from the email body and paste it into a new .txt file. It is not perfect on the receiving end, but for cron job notification purposes, for example, it would work just fine. As well as .txt files containing log information, for example, that are not too lengthy.

If I did not do it as above using the cat command, the contents of the file would be unintelligible.

Sending an email with an attachment using the mail command: a demonstration

If I want to send an email to myself (or someone else), I do something like the following:

cat /home/maria/history.txt | mail -s "This is a local network test for attachments" -A /home/maria/history.txt maria@maria-VirtualBox

And when I execute mail to open up my local email inbox, something like the following appears:

>N  26 Maria              Wed Aug  5 09:07 143/55946 This is a local network t

And when I open the email:

# First run mail command to open the email inbox
mail
# Select the message you want to open. The newest message will appear when you are directed to the inbox. It will contain >N followed by the email number. Type the email number you want to open after the ? prompt and press return.
? 26

This results in something like:

Return-Path: <maria@maria-VirtualBox>
X-Original-To: maria@maria-VirtualBox
Delivered-To: maria@maria-VirtualBox
Received: by maria-VirtualBox.mynetworksettings.com (Postfix, from userid 1000)
id E187A220F50; Wed,  5 Aug 2026 09:37:24 -0400 (EDT)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="2061219202-1785937044=:3899"
Subject: This is a local network test for attachments
To: <maria@maria-VirtualBox>
User-Agent: mail (GNU Mailutils 3.17)
Date: Wed,  5 Aug 2026 09:37:24 -0400
Message-Id: <20260805133724.E187A220F50@maria-VirtualBox.mynetworksettings.com>
From: Maria <maria@maria-VirtualBox>

--2061219202-1785937044=:3899
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-ID: <20260805093724.3899@maria-VirtualBox>

    2  ls
    3  ls cron-job-scripts
    4  cd ..
    (...truncated)

Because I used cat to read the contents of history.txt as stdin to the mail command, the output is included in the email. If, however, I had run:

mail -s "This is a local network test for attachments" -A /home/maria/history.txt maria@maria-VirtualBox

The contents of the attachment would not appear in the email. Instead, I would enter the mail command program, and it would prompt me to include a CC email, and then a message body. No opportunity for attachments.

Including an attachment name field to the email

By default, the mail/mailx command does not produce either an attachment name field or include the name of the attachment in the body of the email. To create a custom filename field, I run the following command:

cat /home/maria/history.txt | mail -s "This is a local network test for attachments" -A /home/maria/history.txt -a "X-Attachment-Name: history.txt" maria@maria-VirtualBox

And Terminal responds with:

Return-Path: <maria@maria-VirtualBox>
X-Original-To: maria@maria-VirtualBox
Delivered-To: maria@maria-VirtualBox
Received: by maria-VirtualBox.mynetworksettings.com (Postfix, from userid 1000)
id 773F1220F50; Wed,  5 Aug 2026 11:45:06 -0400 (EDT)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="1337911927-1785944706=:6131"
Subject: This is a local network test for attachments
X-Attachment-Name: history.txt
To: <maria@maria-VirtualBox>
User-Agent: mail (GNU Mailutils 3.17)
Date: Wed,  5 Aug 2026 11:45:06 -0400
Message-Id: <20260805154506.773F1220F50@maria-VirtualBox.mynetworksettings.com>
From: Maria <maria@maria-VirtualBox>

--1337911927-1785944706=:6131
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-ID: <20260805114506.6131@maria-VirtualBox>

    2  ls
    3  ls cron-job-scripts
    (...truncated)

Introducing Mutt

Creating this custom file-attachment name field is the only way to reference the name of the file attachment in mail or mailx. That is why I switched to Mutt. Mutt actually provides me with a real attachment that I can download:

:Send  q:Abort  t:To  c:CC  s:Subj  a:Attach file  d:Descrip  ?:Help
    From: Maria <maria@maria-VirtualBox>
      To: maria@maria-virtualbox
      Cc:
     Bcc:
 Subject: Sending myself the history.txt attachment
Reply-To:
     Fcc: ~/sent
     Mix: <no chain defined>
Security: None

-- Attachments
- I     1 /var/tmp/mutt-maria-VirtualBox-1000-5817[text/plain, 7bit, us-ascii, 0
  A     2 ~/history.txt                       [text/plain, 7bit, us-ascii, 22K]

And the command I used:

mutt -s "Sending myself the history.txt attachment" -a /home/maria/history.txt -- maria@maria-VirtualBox

The search pitfall of confusing the new Mailx program with the mailutils mailx command

When initially doing research regarding Mailutils, and the mail and mailx commands, I wanted to see if there was any difference between the mail and mailx commands. Sometimes I ran a search with the keywords:

Is mailutils the linux user agent program and mailx or mail the commands to use?

And the top results I got were:

But when I did another search with the keywords:

mail vs mailx command utilities features Linux

I got different top results:

The Mailx referenced in the second search had nothing to do with the mailx command included with the Linux mailutils package. When doing a Google search (or any other kind for that matter) for information regarding a subject, sometimes product-name conflicts will arise. Make sure that you discern whether the information really pertains to the subject matter you are investigating!

Conclusion

In this post, I walk through how to install mailutils and use the mailx or mail command to send, view, and delete messages. I also describe how to send messages to other users on the local network, and how to send a copy of a message to myself. Since the mail command is a utility that allows me to send and receive emails via Terminal, it is a bit cumbersome to use as a main form of email communication with others. For example, I use it solely to receive notifications when my cron jobs complete. To learn more about using the mail command for sending notifications related to cron jobs, please visit The Cron daemon in Linux and how to create a cron job.

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