Sending UTF8 emails with the mail command line

I recently had need to use some UTF8 encoding in the output from a crontab script and wanted that output emailed. Alas the purer forms of the *NIX mail command don’t have a switch to accept additional headers. The solution? Simple abuse the Subject line. You can echo out an additional line after the Subject, thereby effectively adding an additional header into the email.

mail -s "`echo -e 'Original Subject\nContent-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8'`" someone@example.com

The result means lovely UTF-8 formatted emails in the inbox.