Re: Sending mail through IMAP fails

[Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Thursday, October 16 at 09:32 PM, quoth K C H Mackenzie:
> Hello. I am having trouble setting up Mutt to send mail through IMAP on a 
> university server.

I can see your problem already! IMAP is not a protocol that is 
normally used for *sending* email. There are two nearly-identical 
protocols that are used for sending email (SMTP and SUBMISSION), but 
IMAP is only used for *reading* email.

> When I finish composing and type `y' I get `Sending message' and 
> `Mail sent' quickly but no messages have reached their targets.

What's probably happening is that mutt is using the program 
/usr/sbin/sendmail to send email. This is probably provided by exim4 
on your Ubuntu installation, which is probably not set up correctly 
for your network (i.e. it's probably got a default configuration), 
thus, the mail never leaves your computer.

In order to send mail with mutt, you either need to configure it to 
use a mail sending program (such as exim4 or, more minimally, msmtp 
(http://msmtp.sf.net)) that is correctly configured OR you need to 
configure mutt to send the mail directly. To do the latter, you'll 
need to add some things to your muttrc, specifically, an $smtp_url 
setting. It would probably look something like this:

     set smtp_url="smtps://user:password@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/"

> Since I can read/move/delete mail, the problem can't be access to 
> the IMAP server as such.

Indeed, you are correct!

~Kyle
- -- 
Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to 
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beautiful women abound.
                                                     -- Albert Einstein
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