Sending email should be simple. It's something I really don't like thinking about.

I ran into an issue where I wanted to send email from the command line in a bash script that helps power Review Signal. A notification when something goes wrong.

The only problem, I don't have any mailing program installed. I also don't really want to send email from my servers because making sure they get through isn't something I want to spend a lot of time thinking about.

The first solution that jumped to mind was SendGrid, who I had the pleasure of trying out their API at PayPal BattleHack DC. It was dead simple. I had integrated it into PHP though. I didn't know if it worked from the command line.

I checked the docs and found they had a rest API.

curl -d 'to=destination@example.com&toname=Destination&subject=Example Subject&text=testingtextbody&from=info@domain.com&api_user=your_sendgrid_username&api_key=your_sendgrid_password' https://api.sendgrid.com/api/mail.send.json

If you want to clean it up with variables:

#!/bin/sh
SGTO=receiver@example.com
SGTONAME='Some Name'
SGSUBJECT='Email Subject'
SGFROM=from@example.com
SGTEXT='Email Text'
SGUSER=user
SGPASS=password
curl -d "to=${SGTO}&toname=${SGTONAME}&subject=${SGSUBJECT}&text=${SGTEXT}&from=${SGFROM}&api_user=${SGUSER}&api_key=${SGPASS}" https://api.sendgrid.com/api/mail.send.json

Voila! Sending emails from my bash script is now simple.