> can you not just do it the old redirected way? > > mail -s "my log file" my@email.address < /var/log/messages Thats works great for text files, but if you are wanting to mail someone an image if you just redirect it to mail, you get a message full of spooge, and you also can't be sure that it would even end up in your mailbox the same due to some servers striping 8 bit characters down to 7 bit. Anyway, this seems like a common enough issue there is probably an easier way to do it, but you could always build the e-mail by hand and use mimencode to get a binary down to something palatable to the e-mail program. Below is a raw format for how to do it by hand using an attached jpeg as an example. The text within the boundary= header can be anything you want. Just make it unique so that it doesn't have a possibility of occuring in your message. Brian Cluff . normal mail headers... From To Whatever..... . . MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed boundary="----_=_NextPart_000_01C12156.B139BDE0" Status: RO This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. ------_=_NextPart_000_01C12156.B139BDE0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" . . A text message that goes along with your binary data . . ------_=_NextPart_000_01C12156.B139BDE0 Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="Tape.jpg" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Tape.jpg" . . Your binary encoded date that mimencode spits out . . ------_=_NextPart_000_01C12156.B139BDE0--