{"id":315,"date":"2008-11-17T13:13:20","date_gmt":"2008-11-17T21:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/messofpottage.com\/blog\/?p=315"},"modified":"2008-11-17T13:13:20","modified_gmt":"2008-11-17T21:13:20","slug":"getting-email-working-under-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/17\/getting-email-working-under-linux\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Email Working under Linux"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m working on migrating myself to the mutt<\/a> email client. If you’re at all curious about why, and how I’m doing, read on.<\/p>\n

I don’t care for Evolution<\/a>, the default email client, and Mozilla Thunderbird<\/a> is even less appealing. A good part of my disdain is due to the small screen size — 1280×800 — of my laptop. That’s greater than the old “standard” 1024×768 resolution, but the Gnome Desktop generally and Evolution in particular are prodigious in their use of my screen real-estate.<\/p>\n

Plus, I already use a text-mode editor<\/a> for most of my work. Why not go back to the mail agent I used for most of the 1990’s?<\/p>\n

Mutt is a MUA or mail-user-agent. So it’s great at displaying and organizing my mail. But it’s modular. It needs to work with a MDA (mail delivery agent) to move mail around on my system. Tentatively, I plan to use procmail<\/a> for this purpose. It looks like you can make a lifetime hobby out of configuring procmail, but I learned enough at this site to get started.<\/p>\n

I also need an MTA (mail transfer agent) to move mail between my system and other systems out there on the information superhighway. This, in turn, requires separate programs: one to fetch and one to send. I think I’ll use msmtp<\/a> for sending, but I haven’t got around to that part yet.<\/p>\n

For fetching mail, I’ve begun with fetchmail<\/a>. (I may move to mpop<\/a>. But I might not.)<\/p>\n

I’ve gotten fetchmail<\/em> working with my three primary mail accounts. Two sites were straightforward, but Google Mail<\/a> wasn’t. (Actually, it was too, but I didn’t know that. I started out by looking at these two<\/a> pages<\/a>, and they might work for some people but not for me. I gave up on those after an hour.) It turned out that all I needed to access gmail was this:<\/p>\n

\n
\npoll pop.gmail.com protocol pop3\n\tuser \"accountname@gmail.com\" password \"my cuil password\"\n\toptions keep\n\tssl\n\tmda \"\/usr\/bin\/procmail -d %T\"\n\t;\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
where accountname<\/em> is my accountname and “my cuil password<\/code>” is my real password.<\/p>\n
Now all I have to do is figure out how to send mail. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m working on migrating myself to the mutt email client. If you’re at all curious about why, and how I’m doing, read on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRqpr-55","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accretiondisc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}