The previous post looked at setting up offlineimap for managing received emails, and this post will look at setting up msmtp for managing sending emails.
The main reason I don’t like to use Mutt’s built-in SMTP to send directly to Google Mail’s server is that it’s slow. It might not be slow for you, but it’s slow for me. I want to hit Send and for the email to be gone. And msmtp does that for me.
After installing the msmtp package, a very small and simple config is needed which should be saved as .msmtprc in your home folder:
# Multiple accounts are supported, but some changes will need to be made account default host smtp.gmail.com port 587 protocol smtp auth on # These two values should be the same # These can be 'user@gmail.com' or any domain registered with Google Apps with # active Mail settings from user@domain.com user user@domain.com # Change this password xxxxxxxx tls on tls_nocertcheck
As msmtp will queue all emails and send them periodically, a few scripts can be used to help managed this. On Ubuntu this will be in /usr/share/doc/msmtp/examples/msmtpqueue/ and it’s worth copying all three *.sh files to somewhere in your path. For me, that’s /usr/local/bin.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1078 Mar 11 2011 msmtp-enqueue.sh* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 175 Mar 11 2011 msmtp-listqueue.sh* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1228 Mar 11 2011 msmtp-runqueue.sh*
As msmtp-runqueue.sh is used to deliver emails, it needs to be set up on a cronjob that looks like this:
* * * * * /usr/local/bin/msmtp-runqueue.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
The script exits if it is already running, so it’s safe to run this every minute. And msmtp-listqueue.sh can be used to check the current queue at any time, if you feel the need.
In the next article I’ll bring this all together with a Mutt config to use offlineimap and msmtp.
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