I have tried Mail, Sparrow, Airmail and have now returned back to Mutt with my tail wagging between my legs, because they all sucked.

I first spend some time cursing and fighting with postfix mail transfer agents. So fuck it… I am going try simpler alternatives first and work it up from there.

Just Mutt

The build of Mutt that I am playing with at the moment offers support for sending and receiving mail without having to set up any other tools. In order to quickly get moving let’s first examine how we can get a Mutt setup running without any extra bells and whistles. Without further ado; the simplest working ~/.muttrc that would be of any use to me:

set from="vid@bina.me"
set realname="David Asabina"

#set sendmail="/path/to/msmtp"
set use_from=yes
set envelope_from=yes

set imap_user="vid@bina.me"
set imap_pass="`gpg --quiet --for-your-eyes-only -d ~/.mutt/vidbina.gpg`"

set smtp_url="smtp://vid@bina.me@smtp.gmail.com:587/"
set smtp_pass="`gpg --quiet --for-your-eyes-only -d ~/.mutt/vidbina.gpg`"


set folder="imaps://imap.gmail.com:993"
set spoolfile="+INBOX"
set postponed="+[Gmail]/Drafts"

set sort=threads
set editor=vi

source ~/.mutt/colors

Consult Andrew’s Mutt tutorial in order to get colors set up on your configuration.

The passwords have not been entered into my muttrc in plain text but are decrypted using my private key setup on my box. This requires you to get GPG-ed up. I have dedicated another post to explaining the GPG basics (the internet already has plenty of wonderful resources regarding this too).

Set created ~/.mbox

Speed Things Up by Caching

The problem with the simple setup described above is that it requires a connection to the IMAP server in order to be of much use to you. Mutt, being the powerhouse she is, obviously knows a trick or two to resolve that.

With caching enabled we will be able to cache the headers and/or messages on our local box by simply setting the header_cache and message_cache variables.

set header_cache=~/.mutt/hdrs
set message_cachedir=~/.mutt/msgs

Although caching speeds things up it’s is not really the solution for the travelling hacker. We need to be able to use Mutt while offline too.

Offline Mailing

Now that there is a working mutt setup one could finetune stuff. For one Mutt’s native IMAP implementation performs IO somewhat in a blocking fashion which freezes up the pup when the connection dissapears. This means that it may be time to use something like msmtp and fetchmail to avoid the Mutt quicks.

Sending mail with msmtp

For sending emails one may use msmtp, ssmtp, sendmail but based on the one the frustration it just caused me I have decided to listen and go for something simple first. Mind you that msmtp does not offer offline mailing out of the box, we will have to setup a queue for msmtp if we would like this privilege, but having msmtp running is a start.

brew install msmtp

In order to get msmtp ready to roll we will need to point it to the CA bundle on our mech. I have used Adrew’s instructions to build my own pack of certificates stored into the path ~/.mutt/ca-bundle.crt.

defaults
tls on
tls_starttls on
tls_trust_file ~/.certs/ca-bundle.crt
logfile ~/.mutt/msmtp.log

account vidbina
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
protocol smtp
auth on
from "vid@bina.me"
user "vid@bina.me"
passwordeval "gpg --quiet --for-your-eyes-only --decrypt ~/.mutt/vidbina.gpg"

We could call msmtp with the --serverinfo flag to confirm the settings make a bit of sense. In my case a prompt appears for my passphrase while GPG attempts to decrypt my SMTP password, subsequently followed by some of the server details of the Google server that manages my mail.

msmtp --serverinfo -a $ACCOUNT

Mutt does not allow us to run any tools that demand terminal input from the user. Which means that the passphrase prompt will not bode well with the canine. In order to mitigate this issue we could use gpg-agent to cache the token for later use. The agent would then make sure that the gpg call is provided the proper passphrase and carries on its simple chore.

Lets first ensure that the ~/.msmtprc passwordeval line no longer hooks up to a terminal for possible input by changing the last line to

passwordeval "gpg --quiet --no-tty --for-your-eyes-only --decrypt ~/.mutt/vidbina.gpg"

In order to remember the passphrase we should see to it that the ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf file contains the use-agent setting.

# Some line in the gpg conf file
use-agent

Furthermore we will need to ensure that our box knows how to fire up the gpg-agent when necessary. The agent needs to know which terminal to work with and furthermore it will need the GPG_AGENT_INFO variable to be set.

By appending the following lines to our shell’s *rc file or ~/.*_profile we can set the GPG_TTY (terminal), export it and also set the GPG_AGENT_INFO and SSH_AUTH_SOCK variables if this information is available.

GPG_TTY=$(tty)
export GPG_TTY

if [ -f "/tmp/.gpg-agent-info" ]; then
  . "/tmp/.gpg-agent-info"
  export GPG_AGENT_INFO
  export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
fi

The previous addition to our shell’s configuration depends on the /tmp/.gpg-agent-info file. When starting the gpg-agent it is also possible to instruct the agent to create the needed file by telling the gpg agent to fire up using the following command:

gpg-agent --daemon --enable-ssh-support \
  --write-env-file "/tmp/.gpg-agent-info"

With this setup we will be able to have msmtp handle our mailing while keeping passwords very secret. There will be no need to enter the passphrase every time gpg gets going. If you do need to enter the passphrase, because maybe the cache has expired, you will be prompted by a nifty fron-end to enter the passphrase. This does not interfere with Mutt. The only requirement is that gpg-agent is running.

Note that the terminal used by the gpg-agent stays the same untill the agent is setup to use another terminal session. This means that you would have to return to the terminal session within which the agent was setup.

Queing outgoing e-mail

Now that msmtp and mutt play ball :ball: it becomes time to consider how to deal with outgoing messages when the connection is not playing along.

Receiving mail

Mutt has some ability to retrieve mail but since it wasn’t quite designed to work in a multi-threaded manner large mail-retrieval jobs may render Mutt unresponsive until retrieval is completed. Tools such as offlineimap allow for the retrieval of e-mail through cronjobs or manual terminal runs that have no impact on the responsiveness of Mutt.

With offlineimap installed, retrieval becomes as simple as running offlineimap from a terminal.

Keybindings

As knowing how to operate Mutt is generally down to knowning the keybindings, I have listed some of the most important bindings in the sections below. The command to the help page should be listed as the last property in the topbar when Mutt is open which happens to be ? in a default Mutt setup.

Basic Navigation (from Index)

Basic Actions (from Index)

Compose Mode

At some places I will refer to Mutt functions in italics in which case one should be able to find that entry as a literal string in the second column of the help page. Let’s assume that I refer to the Mutt command search which is printed in italics. You can

1. type / to start searching (by default / should be bound to the search command) then
2. type the italicized string (search in this case) followed by
3. enter

and Mutt should get you to the line that explains it all (1st column is the keystroke, 2nd column the command name and 3rd column represents a description of the feature) :wink:. You could repeat this search by pressing n which is bound to search-next by default.

Tricks

Mutt allows you to quickly perform some operations on batches of emails that would have required multiple clicks with other clients. In order to get this trick it is absolutely convenient to be aware of the different patterns and the tagging functionality of mutt.

Archiving tagged messages

One could tag messages by stepping through the list page and tagging individual messages using the tag-entry function (bound to the t key, if you sport a default Mutt setup).

One can save a message to the archive by entering

s=Archive

where s is bound to the save-message command in the default configuration of mutt.

Mutt’s save actualy writes a message to the destination and removes it from the source location. In that regards save is more like a typical move command while Mutt’s copy command actually writes to the destination and keeps the original in its source location.

Since we do not only wish to save the message upon which the cursor rests but all tagged messages I prepend the archive command with the tag-prefix operator (which is bound to ; in the default Mutt setup)

;s=Archive

in order to have the command apply to all tagged messages.

Up next I demonstrate the usage of different patterns in tagging messages. Perhaps you will choose to archive, perhaps you just want to delete, or maybe even forward. Mutt can do it all :email:

Tagging messages older than 60days

The tag-pattern command (default T) allows us to tag multiple messages using a pattern in comparison to tag-entry command (default t) that only allows us to tag the message at the cursor.

The ~d pattern allows us to specify date conditions and in the next example I use these features to tag all messages with their date greater than 60 days.

T\~d\>60d

Obviously I could perform some operation on all these tagged messages as demonstrated in the previous example :wink:.

;s=Archive

Tagging all messages from facebook

The ~f pattern allows us to define a pattern for the sender. If we simply want to tag all messages coming from Facebook we could use the following command

T~ffacebook.com

Tagging all messages with certain keywords

In this example I check for message content and want all messages that contain any of the following keywords facebook, twitter, instagram, vimeo or youtube to be tagged.

Tfacebook|twitter|instagram|vimeo|youtube

View open message in browser

Many of the messages that I receive are formatted in HTML. Mutt fortunately can pipe your messages into any viewer/pager/browser of your choice (provided you can pipe data into it).

By default Mutt has | bound to the pipe-message command which would allow me to pipe my email into w3m for easier viewing

|w3m -T text/html

Forward Messages with Attachments

Pressing the <Esc>e combination triggers the resend-message command. There is probably a better way to do this, but it works well enough in my situation.

mbox to Maildir conversion

One can use the mb2md tool to convert mbox files to Maildir files in case this is necessary. Upon tagging multiple messages and writing them to a given directory that didn’t exist e.g.: ;s=Archive.2016, I happened to find all tagged emails written to a single mbox file with the name “Archive.2016”. In this case, I had to convert mbox files back into a maildir in order to allow offlineimap to properly sync them.

mb2md -s /tmp/new/Archive.2016 -d /tmp/newmail/

Remember to use full paths for source file in order to avoid running into Fatal: Source is not an mbox file or a directory! errors as documented in this thread

Maildir basics

A Maildir¹ contains:

• new for messages not yet seen by the mail client
• cur for messages already seen by the mail client (messages are moved here from “new”)
• tmp for temporary messages (that are being drafted, for example)

Subfolders in Mailbox terminology are the organizational structures within a respective mailbox such as “Drafts” and “Sent”.

Links

• neomuttrc
• The Homely Mutt, Steve Losh
• Replacing offlineimap with mbsync
• A Quick Guide to Mutt
• Using msmtp with Mutt