Someone finally showed me a simple, fool-proof method to send binary attachments reliably from various Linux systems:

echo "Cheeseburger" | mutt -s "OHAI!" -a lolcat.jpg -- recipient@domain.com

If you e-mail doesn't arrive, remember to consider the size of the file that you're sending and the restrictions of the receiver's e-mail server. Keep in mind that encoding the binary attachment will cause the size of the e-mail to creep up a bit more (about 1.37x plus a little extra with Base64).

Sending binary e-mail attachments from the command line with mutt is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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First, use mutt to connect to your server remotely (via IMAP over SSL in this example):

mutt -f imaps://mail.yourdomain.com/

Once you've connected and logged in, press SHIFT-D (uppercase d). The status bar of mutt should show:

Delete messages matching:

Type in ~s .* so that the line looks like:

Delete messages matching: ~s .*

When you press enter, mutt will put a D next to all of the messages, which marks them for deletion. Press q to quit, and then y to confirm the deletion. After a brief moment, all of those messages will be deleted and mutt will exit.

Update: If you review Dmitri's comment below, there's an even faster way to remove all of the messages in a mailbox with mutt. Just hold shift while pressing D, ~ (tilde), and A to select everything:

D~A

Deleting all e-mail messages in your inbox with mutt is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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