Re: Mutt and SMTP
On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 11:34:16AM -0500, you (Stefano Ferri) wrote:
>
>
> Dear folks,
>
> this is the first time I post in this mailing list.
> I am not a "real" system administrator but I had the chance
> to be root on many Unix/Linux machines (usually machines
> used for mathematical simulation with very few users, I am
> a mathematician in real life), both Sun and x86.
>
> I have used mutt for many years, usually with little or no
> problems but recently I tried to set up mutt on a laptop to
> be used with the pop and smtp servers of our university and
> I had a hell of a time. I hope that some of you have the time
> and the patience to read what I did and to help me. Possibly
> the real problem is with the sendmail setting, I hope this
> does not make this message OT.
>
> This is what I did.
>
> I am running Linux 2.6.9-11.EL, so mutt (1.4.1i) comes as a
> part of the distribution.
>
> I just started by adding the following lines to .muttrc
>
> set mbox = $mypopserver
> set pop_host = $mypopserver
> set pop_user = my@address
> set spoolfile = $mypopserver
> set pop_pass="$my.mail.password"
> set sendmail="/usr/sbin/sendmail"
>
> This way I could read my mail but when I tried to send mail
> it sometimes did not work. Namely, I could send mail to most
> commercial addresses (like yahoo or gmail) but if I sent a
> mail to myself or to collegues in other universities the
> mail bounched back with a message saying that my mailer was
> badly configurated.
>
> I started to think that the problem was in the fact that
> smtp was not properly accessed (but why did it work to yahoo
> then?), so I changed the sendmail.mc file un-commenting the
> following lines:
>
> define(`SMART_HOST',`$mysmtpserver')
> MASQUERADE_AS(`$mydomain')
> FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)
>
> I also changes the file access adding the following line:
>
> AuthInfo:$mysmtpserver "U:me@address" "I:me@address" "P:my.mail.massword"
>
> and run make from /etc/mail
>
> It turned out that I did not have the sendmail-cf package.
> I downloaded a version called sendmail 8.13.8.orig.tar.gz from
>
> http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/sendmail-cf
>
> This, unce gunzipped and untarred create a strange maze of directories:
>
> /usr/local/sendmail-8.13.8/sendmail-8.13.8/cf/cf
> from which I made make install-cf
>
> It did not complain but now mutt...does nothing (I mean, I can
> read but not send anything).
>
> I then figured out that maybe the SSL certificate was the problem,
> I went to /usr/share/ssl/certs and gave the command
> make sendmail.pem which seemed to produce something.
>
> However still cannot send mail...
>
> If I try to send and then make ps -ef | grep sendmail I get the
> following:
>
> root 2190 1 0 08:10 ? 00:00:00 sendmail: accepting
> connections
> smmsp 2198 1 0 08:10 ? 00:00:00 sendmail: Queue
> runner@01:00:00
> for /var/spool/clientmqueue
>
> Did any of you have any idea of what did I do wrong? Suggestions or
> help?
>
> Thank you in advance for your time.
>
> Stefano
Hi Stefano,
do I understand correctly: you want to use mutt with pop/smpt on a laptop?
If so I suggest you'll have a look at the msmtp project. This should be a
simple and convenient way
to solve our smtp problem.
Regards,
markus