You know, sending email from the command line isn't quite trivial, if you want to send in anything other than ascii. Telnet[0] to port 25 can be a lot of fun (alternatively openssl s_client[1] -starttls smtp ...).
For anyone not already familiar with this I'd recommend having a look at heirloom mailx[2].
Note, you can of course also pipe stuff to "/usr/bin/sendmail -t", which I'm sure was the thing claudio was alluding to.