[thelist] [OT] Mutt and SMTP

[Peter Lowe]

Hello Burhan,

On Nov 07, Burhan Khalid wrote:
>    It is my understanding that mutt doesn't do SMTP, but rather it just 
> sends off the email to a service on the local host that is listening on 
> 25. Is this correct?

Not quite - mutt just uses invokes the local MTA and leaves everything
up to that. The MTA doesn't have to be running on port 25 (in fact, if
you're not planning on running a fully fledged mail server on your
machine it's a good idea to make sure port 25 is closed).

> If so, what MTA can I use so that I can configure 
> it to send via smtp.work.com for emails that are coming from my work 
> email address, and smtp.play.com for emails that are from my other email 
> addresses?  For now, I'm using ssmtp -- but having a bit of a headache 
> trying to get it to work.

I've never personally set up or used a unixish machine that doesn't have
some sort of MTA installed. Most come with sendmail installed as part of
the base system, although a lot of people (including me) like to replace
sendmail with something like postfix (my favourite), qmail, exim, etc.

If ssmtp has been installed somewhere other than the default location
for sendmail (and sendmail hasn't been installed or is disabled), you'll
need to change the "sendmail" setting in your .muttrc. From "man muttrc":

      sendmail
             Type: path
             Default: "/usr/sbin/sendmail -oem -oi"

             Specifies the program and arguments used to deliver  mail
             sent  by  Mutt.   Mutt expects that the specified program
             interprets additional arguments as recipient addresses.

What happens when you try and send a mail? You can normally find out
what's going on from /var/log/maillog - are there any clues there? You
might like to tail -f /var/log/maillog and try sending a mail to see
what happens.

Also, try checking the root mailbox ("mutt -f /var/mail/root" as root
should work), as bounces etc should end up there, and might be able to
tell you what's going on.

>    Upon searching the mutt-users mailing list, I found an interesting 
> thread that stated in short that windows email clients (example given 
> was for netscape mail) have their own built-in smtp server that just 
> relays to the external smtp server ... is this true?

Sort of. Most can connect to port 25 and do the basics for sending mail
(which consists of very few commands); they don't do much else though.

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> 
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> 
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> 
> </tip>

I forget who it was who suggested this before, but I've been using
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looking for as a lightweight replacement for UltraEdit.

cheers,

Peter

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