RSS

New mutt 1.5.15 has a very nice new feature!

Just found today when I was looking to see if I missed something with the mutt sidebar patch (still irritates me that I have to sync a mailbox *before* jumping to another mailbox in order for the counts in the sidebar to be updated properly), that mutt 1.5.15 was released earlier this month. This is an extremely worthwhile upgrade, especially because it now has SMTP support built-in. It’s about time!

No more having to use exim or postfix to relay the mail, you can now send the mail out directly from mutt itself which makes things a whole lot nicer. The relevant section of the documentation covers it a little bit more, but I’ve just tested it out and it works great (you will want to compile it using –enable-smtp and –with-sasl). Works wonderfully with non-authenticated SMTP (good for using your ISP’s mail server) and also works with authenticated SMTP (tried with my server which uses CRAM-MD5), and also supports using an email address as a login (i.e you could use “set smtp_url=”smtp://joe@user.com:password@smtp.myhost.com” and it works properly).

All in all, kudos to the mutt team for getting this in place! I’ll have to update my wiki to cover this as it largely makes irrelevant the sections I have in there configuring postfix and exim to relay mail (which you can still do if you like).

12 Comments
Apr 30, 2007
By vdanen Linux

12 Comments

  1. Dominique

    Salut Vincent!

    weird, I just cannot get the set smtp_url to work.

    Error in /home/d/.mutt151rc, line 5: smtp_url: unknown variable
    source: errors in /home/d/.mutt151rc
    Press any key to continue…

    Is it working for you? I compiled with –enable-smtp

    May 10, 2007 @ 14:31:14

  2. Vincent Danen

    Hmmm… it’s working here. I’m sending all my mail through my ISP’s SMTP server. I’ve got:

    set smtp_url=”smtp://mail.myisp.com”

    My little configure script for mutt looks like:

    #!/bin/sh

./configure --prefix=/sw --with-curses --with-regex --enable-locales-fix \
  --enable-pop --enable-imap --enable-hcache --enable-smtp --with-sasl=/sw --with-ssl --mandir=/sw/share/man &&
make &&
sudo make install

    I don’t *think* that you need anything special to compile the smtp support; should be all there regardless of external libs and stuff.

    Hopefully the above helps a little bit.

    May 10, 2007 @ 14:48:22

  3. Dominique

    I rechecked my configure script. I had –with-smtp, not –enable-smtp in there! Now it works! Without the option SMTP support is not compiled in.

    cheers

    May 10, 2007 @ 16:10:19

  4. Vincent Danen

    Yeah, that would do it. I’ve been hit by using –with when need to use –enable and vice-versa. =)

    May 13, 2007 @ 21:30:32

  5. seanh

    Hmm… I get mutt saying to me:

    Could not connect to smtp.sms.ed.ac.uk (Interrupted system call).

    Got it with two different SMTP servers.

    I compiled mutt with the –enable-smtp and –with-sasl and –with-ssl options.

    Here’s the section from my muttrc:

    set smtp_url=smtp://user@server/
    set smtp_pass=password

    I also tried putting smtps:// in the server address, no change.

    Am I doing something wrong?

    Aug 02, 2007 @ 08:08:06

  6. Vincent Danen

    Hmmm… haven’t seen that one before.

    Is there a reason tho that you’re not using something like fetchmail? I’m wondering about that “Interrupted system call” message… that’s what I’ve not seen before.

    Oh wait. I think you’re syntax is wrong.

    Use:

    set smtp_url=”smtp://user:password@server”
    set smtp_authenticators=”cram-md5″

    The latter might not be required; it depends on the SMTP server setup. But I think the password needs to be part of the smtp_url, not a separate item.

    Aug 02, 2007 @ 09:40:49

  7. seanh

    Still get the same problem even using that exact syntax I’m afraid. Thanks for trying to help.

    Aug 02, 2007 @ 11:11:39

  8. Seth

    I’m surprised that you weren’t previously using msmtp to deliver your mail, in lieu of postfix or exim. msmtp is much easier to setup and configure imo.

    Looking forward to this new version of mutt hitting the OpenBSD ports tree.

    Aug 03, 2007 @ 15:39:38

  9. vijay

    can you please help me i have configured the Mutt and SMTP but still getting the error smtp_url: unknown variable

    Aug 28, 2009 @ 01:47:54

  10. vdanen

    Do you have the latest version of mutt? Did you compile it yourself, and if so, did you pass –enable-smtp to ./configure?

    Aug 28, 2009 @ 06:22:08

  11. Piotr Szotkowski

    Hi, did you figure out how not to have sync a mailbox *before* jumping to another mailbox in order for the counts in the sidebar to be updated properly?

    I tried ‘folder-hook . exec sync-mailbox’ but it doesn’t seem to work (it probably tries to sync the folder I arrive in, not the one I’m leaving).

    Jul 05, 2010 @ 12:10:14

  12. vdanen

    Nope, I never figured it out. I’ve actually been using the stock mutt as provided with Fedora, and it doesn’t include the patch. I’ve missed having those counts, but I’ve been too lazy to roll my own.

    Jul 06, 2010 @ 06:56:11

Leave a Reply

*