Blat

Before all the fancy interface designs provided the comfort and ease of use to effortlessly work on your projects, many advanced operations had to be performed through command line interfaces. However, the technique is far from being obsolete, and reduce the risk of compatibility or coding errors. A suitable example is Blat, letting you send your emails from the Command Prompt.

Needless to say that it doesn’t need to be installed on your computer to benefit from what it has to offer. However, it’s best to run an elevated instance of Command Prompt so the application has access to system registries, because it’s needed to set up email server parameters, and save your credentials.

By default, the application considers you’re working with a SMTP server, and there’s a simple, dedicated server install command to handle this type of connection. On the other hand, you can use an alternative command if you want to set up NNTP, POP3, and IMAP email servers, with the process requiring a few more parameters, such as address, port, credentials, and a few more.

Depending on the complexity of the email message you want to send, there are multiple arguments and switches you can combine to either write the body inside the command line interface, or have it imported from an external file. Sending can be done to a single source, or with multiple addresses in CC.

Apart from a text file you can use as message body, the application gives you the possibility to send attachments as well, with switches to load different types, depending on encoding. Importing can also be done for an entire mailing list, to make it easier to target more addresses at a time.

Emails are an important part of modern communication, and Blat proves that as longs as you’re connected to the Internet, you don’t necessarily have to install or use complex applications to perform some basic operations. Sure enough, not everyone is willing to work with a command line interface, but enthusiasts can benefit from an impressive variety of commands and switches, for multiple server types.