Email with Mutt, IMAP and SSMTP
26 February 2009
I have written about my previous experience with mutt, and I shared my Mutt cheatsheet. Today, I started using Mutt again for a new account. Last time, I used fetchmail to pull all my email down locally, this time, I am using an externally hosted email accessed through IMAP.
The machine runs Gentoo, so I ran:
cat mail-client/mutt ssl imap pop > /etc/portage/package.use emerge mutt
On Ubuntu, you can use:
sudo apt-get install mutt
As well as Mutt, you also need a way to send email from your system. Traditionally that would mean running a full SMTP server.
However, if you using a domestic Internet connection where the IP Address is dynamic, or if you are doing everything from a laptop that moves around, then using a full SMTP server is possibly not the best plan.
So in these cases, you can use a simple transfer agent that just forwards outgoing mail to a full SMTP server hosted elsewhere, such as one provided by your ISP, University or whatever.
There are several of these, including nbsmtp, esmtp and ssmtp. I have used nbsmtp before but this time I am using ssmtp since it was on my system already.
If you don't have it already, you can install it with, on Gentoo:
emerge ssmtp
On Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install ssmtp
In order to be allowed to send email, you need to add yourself to the ssmtp group:
sudo usermod -a -G ssmtp username
Or the more modern approach:
sudo adduser username ssmtp
Now we need to edit the ssmtp configuration:
sudo emacs /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf
This depends a little on your set up, I used the following:
root=Your email address
mailhub=Your SMTP Server
rewriteDomain=Your email domain
AuthUser=Your username at the SMTP server (e.g. your email address)
AuthPass=Your password at the SMTP server
UseTLS=YES
UseSTARTTLS=YES
FromLineOverride=YES
If all is well, then we can test the outgoing mail by sending an email to somewhere:
echo "hello world" | /usr/sbin/ssmtp someemail@provider.com
If you don't get the email, then your settings are not correct.
Now we need to configure mutt by editing the personal configuration file:
emacs ~/.muttrc
I put in the following to retrieve the email via IMAP:
set folder="imaps://username@server.com"
set spoolfile="imaps://username@server.com/INBOX"
set imap_pass="password"
set sendmail="/usr/sbin/ssmtp"
set from="Your Name <email@address.net>;"
Now I had functioning email. Mutt has completely configurable colours, so theming Mutt is a big part of it.
For now, I just grabbed the scheme from Andy Smith's blog
I hope that is useful to someone. I would be interested in you handle your email. What do you like and dislike about your email setup?
If you are a Mutt user, please let us all know how you find it and feel free to give us tips and tricks that you have learned along the way.
1 Andri says...
I propose you use /bin/echo instead of /bin/cat and append-pipe (>>) to package.use.
Posted at 2:25 p.m. on April 2, 2009