I have written about my previous experience with mutt, and I shared my Mutt cheatsheet. Today, I started using Mutt again for a new account. Last time, I used fetchmail to pull all my email down locally, this time, I am using an externally hosted email accessed through IMAP.

The machine runs Gentoo, so I ran:

cat mail-client/mutt ssl imap pop > /etc/portage/package.use emerge mutt

On Ubuntu, you can use:

sudo apt-get install mutt

As well as Mutt, you also need a way to send email from your system. Traditionally that would mean running a full SMTP server.

However, if you using a domestic Internet connection where the IP Address is dynamic, or if you are doing everything from a laptop that moves around, then using a full SMTP server is possibly not the best plan.

So in these cases, you can use a simple transfer agent that just forwards outgoing mail to a full SMTP server hosted elsewhere, such as one provided by your ISP, University or whatever.

There are several of these, including nbsmtp, esmtp and ssmtp. I have used nbsmtp before but this time I am using ssmtp since it was on my system already.

If you don't have it already, you can install it with, on Gentoo:

emerge ssmtp

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

In order to be allowed to send email, you need to add yourself to the ssmtp group:

sudo usermod -a -G ssmtp username

Or the more modern approach:

sudo adduser username ssmtp

Now we need to edit the ssmtp configuration:

sudo emacs /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

This depends a little on your set up, I used the following:

root=Your email address
mailhub=Your SMTP Server
rewriteDomain=Your email domain
AuthUser=Your username at the SMTP server (e.g. your email address)
AuthPass=Your password at the SMTP server
UseTLS=YES
UseSTARTTLS=YES
FromLineOverride=YES

If all is well, then we can test the outgoing mail by sending an email to somewhere:

echo "hello world" | /usr/sbin/ssmtp someemail@provider.com

If you don't get the email, then your settings are not correct.

Now we need to configure mutt by editing the personal configuration file:

emacs ~/.muttrc

I put in the following to retrieve the email via IMAP:

set folder="imaps/username@server.com"
set spoolfile="imaps/username@server.com/INBOX"
set imap_pass="password"
set sendmail="/usr/sbin/ssmtp"
set from="Your Name <email@address.net>;"

Now I had functioning email. Mutt has completely configurable colours, so theming Mutt is a big part of it.

For now, I just grabbed the scheme from Andy Smith's blog

I hope that is useful to someone. I would be interested in you handle your email. What do you like and dislike about your email setup?

If you are a Mutt user, please let us all know how you find it and feel free to give us tips and tricks that you have learned along the way.