Sending e-mail with zip file attachment via mailx to Outlook

[Linda Stowell]

I need to send a mail file with several attachments from HP UX to Outlook. The problem is that we have a 5mb limit on the size of the attachments. Since one file is 7mb, I am trying to use tar to zip and compress the files and then using mailx to send this file to Outlook. I get the e-mail but the zipped file is not-readable with winzip. Below are the commands that I am using. Is it possible to read with winzip a file that was zipped with tar on Unix? Has anyone had any luck with this?

Thanks for the help.

tar cvf - BRKRCM.*.csv | compress > $ZIPFILE
uuencode $ZIPFILE $ZIPFILE | mailx -m -s "EPM Broker Commission CSV File"

[Geoff Wild]

I don't know if this will help - but try using mpack to send the file instead:

http://hpux.ee.ualberta.ca/hppd/hpux/Users/mpack-1.6/



Rgds...Geoff

[Doug O'Leary]

Hey;

You also might try gzip instead of compress. I've *generally* gotten better compression from gzip than from compress...

HTH;

Doug

[Ivan Ferreira]

bzip2 has even better compression ratio.

[Sandman!]

Linda,

You're not specifying an output file for the tar command "-" is for stdin not stdout. Might help breaking up the command line:

# tar cvf BRKRCM.*.csv
# compress
# uuencode | mailx -m -s "EPM Broker Commission CSV File"

cheers!

[Jeff_Traigle]

There's nothing wrong with the command line she's using. Tar sending to stdout piped to stdin of compress with it's stdout redirected to a file. Just the way it's all supposed to behave. If she wanted to, she could even put the whole thing on a singel command line by piping stdout from compress into uuencode like this:

tar cvf - BRKRCM.*.csv | compress | uuencode $ZIPFILE | mailx -m -s "EPM Broker Commission CSV File"

As for WinZip handling compressed (Z) and tar archives, I've never had a problem. It's handled those formats for years and numerous versions.

Getting things to show up on the other end can be tricky, however. I think I've sent to Outlook clients before without the -m option on mailx.

[Sandman!]

For Jeff...I'm unable to make your command work so the suggestion to break it up (easier to debug)?

[Jeff_Traigle]

Don't know. Works fine for me.

Linda, I don't have a way to test with Outlook and WinZIP, but, if the attachment is showing up in Outlook all right, you might try 7-Zip as an alternative to WinZIP to see if that handles the file any better. Free software and it seemed to work fine on my little test case I ran.

www.7-zip.org

[Linda Stowell]

I figured out my problem. The file that I used the tar command on didn't have .tar extension which caused confusion with winzip. As soon as I renamed it to a .tar, winzip worked. However I couldn't get compress to work but I did get gzip to work for me. Below is what I ended up with. I had to rename the gzip file to have a .gzip extension because it wouldn't open in Outlook with the .gz extension (it actually made the contents of the file the body of the e-mail message).

Thanks for everyone's help.

tar cvf BRKRCM.tar BRKRCM.*.csv

gzip BRKRCM.tar

cp BRKRCM.tar.gz BRKRCM.tar.gzip

uuencode BRKRCM.tar.gzip BRKRCM.tar.gzip | mailx -m -s "EPM Broker Commission CSV File"

[Sandman!]

Linda,

I used the same commands w/o renaming the "gz" file to "gzip" and WinZip had no problems opening them.

# tar cvf BRKRCM.tar BRKRCM.*.csv; gzip BRKRCM.tar
# uuencode BRKRCM.tar.gz BRKRCM.tar.gz | mailx -m -s "EPM Broker Commission CSV File"

my 2 cents!