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UNIX: Flag an e-mail message as high priority

Question: How can I flag an e-mail message as "high priority" in sendmail?

Answer: E-mail was not originally designed to allow priority rankings. However, there are tags that can be added to the message header to simulate priority.

There are two tags that are commonly used by Microsoft to express priority in Outlook e-mail systems. These are:

X-Priority: 1 (Highest)
X-MSMail-Priority: High

To flag an e-mail as high priority using sendmail, you need to do the following:

First create a file called message.txt. An example of the file contents is shown below:

To: someone@yahoo.com
Subject: Test
Content-Type: text/plain
X-Priority: 1 (Highest)
X-MSMail-Priority: High

Hi there. How are you?
Somebody

Then enter the following command:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -t < message.txt

This will send an e-mail to someone@yahoo.com. If the recipient is using MS Outlook/Outlook Express, the message will appear as high priority. Please note that other e-mail packages may not acknowledge these tags at all or may interpret them differently than Outlook/Outlook Express.