A month on the command line, Day 12: Mutt barks!

After days and days of being able to receive IMAP mail but not send it with mutt, I finally cracked the problem. What took me a little while to understand -- that mutt needed a separate SMTP client to send Internet e-mail -- took a lot longer to actually get working.

First things first: The IMAP mail service I'm using is freelinuxemail.com, which I believe is sponsored by Linspire. The mail service is run by fastmail.fm, but what makes freelinuxemail.com different is that you get to use their outgoing server for free; it costs extra with the plain fastmail.fm.

At the freelinuxemail.com/fastmail.fm site, there are configuration instructions for pine. (I tried them, they didn't work, deleted pine, days later reinstalled pine, tried again, still didn't work). But nothing for mutt. Some of those who replied to my previous post are using up to four separate applications to handle their e-mail, and I was getting mighty dizzy from the whole thing. I tinkered with my configuration files for days, but still nothing).

I thought the problem was esmtp, the SMTP client I was using.

While pursuing other solutions to the outgoing-mail problem, I looked around for other SMTP clients and found msmtp.

I immediately knew what I was doing wrong.

From the instructions for using msmtp with mutt (bolding for emphasis added by me):

2. Configure msmtp:

Create the file .msmtprc in your home directory, with no more
permissions than user read/write (0600, -rw-------).

I had the wrong permissions on .esmtprc all along. How did I miss that?

To change the permissions on the .msmtprc configuration file, I turned to Michael Stutz's "The Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition," Page 169, for the command:

$ chmod go= .msmtprc

Now .msmtprc was set to private (read/write only by me), and I was in business.

I'm pretty sure resetting the permissions on .esmtprc would have yielded the same result, but for now, I'm sticking with msmtp, and I'll try to figure out how to use this combination (mutt and msmtp) to access a POP account, and, hopefully, multiple IMAP and POP accounts simultaneously.

By the way, while it did lead me astray at times, the instructions I used for initial configuration of mutt and esmtp were from O'Reilly's MacDevCenter (although the path to esmtp was different, I didn't need to match anything up with OS X's Mail.app since this is Linux, and I guess on OS X the read-write permissions of .esmtprc were not an issue).

Another good mutt resource on the Web is My First Mutt, which I'm just beginning to explore.

I will post my config files for mutt, msmtp and esmtp as soon as I get the time.

And thanks to all who helped and encouraged me to continue with e-mail on the command line.