A month on the command line, Day 15: e-mail progress
Again, and for the fifth or so time, IT SHOULDN'T BE THIS HARD.
I've had some success with my IMAP mail from freelinuxemail.com. Mutt and msmtp are handling things very well. I'd love to beef up my .muttrc file to sort things (maybe I need procmail) and I'd like to figure out how to create additional folders on the IMAP server, but for now just getting e-mail and being able to send it is good enough.
As I said in a comment on the last A Month at the Command Line post, I tried pine again.
Well, first I tried to piggyback a POP account on my current mutt/msmtp setup, but that wasn't working at all. So I tried to configure pine as a POP mail client. After I tried the settings in about a half-dozen Web tutorials, I was able to download all my POP mail (which unfortunately meant that those e-mails are no longer on the POP server and are no longer accessible by the company's Web-mail interface ... and no, there doesn't seem to be IMAP capability).
I've got to tell you, in this day and age of always-on Internet, IMAP is the way to go -- you can read and write e-mail from a variety of locations and computers and not have mail stored on one (unless you want to save them locally, that is). It makes for a lot more flexibility.
But back to pine. I used fetchmail to get the mail into the box and put it wherever mail is supposed to go (into my Linux user account) so mutt can find it. I'm not rock solid on the particulars, but it works. Sending the mail -- that's where I have a problem. In mutt, I needed msmtp (or esmtp) to send mail. Pine doesn't seem to need an external program to send mail, but I just can't get the server to accept my login and password. There might be authentication, SSL or TLS that I need to address. I've got to look into it again and then figure out how to do it in pine.
But I'd rather not use pine at all and do everything through mutt ...
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
I don't know what you mean by saying that there doesn't appear to be IMAP
capability.
The authors of Pine at the University of Washington invented IMAP. Pine is designed from the ground up to use IMAP.
The syntax for accessing an IMAP folder in Pine is slightly awkward in my opinion, and I can't remember it as I haven't used Pine much for a long time, but it's all documented in the Pine online help.
There is also a useful tool called OfflineIMAP which will synchronize IMAP folders with folders on your local system, so that changes are immediately carried over from one folder collection (local or remote) to the other.
If you're running Debian or Ubuntu, try
aptitude show offlineimap
for a quick description.
That's my bad. I'll admit that I didn't test pine as extensively as needed. Once I got mutt working, I pretty much left pine alone, although I didn't remove it from the system and will return to it at some point.
I also saw that the UW people are working on a new mail system, Alpine, that is going to be an open-source offering under the Apache license, so I'm pretty happy about that.
While I finally did get mutt working with IMAP and POP (details forthcoming in a new blog entry), some of the configuration files out there for both mutt and pine are staggering in their complexity, and my hat is off -- way off -- to those who built them. I really, really like command-line e-mail, even though Thunderbird makes things much, much easier. But once you get your CLI e-mail system working, it's a real productivity boost because mail can be read, replied to and archived or deleted so incredibly quickly.
fastmail.fm/freelinuxemail.com supports pine (and not mutt), but I couldn't get it working in pine by following their configuration instructions. If that had worked, I'd be using pine right now ...
I do like pine, and it was great for reading my POP mail (except that I couldn't figure out how to keep the mail on the server). I used fetchmail to get the mail, and that worked great, too. But I couldn't get pine and my smtp server to cooperate -- I might try again with a different server and give pine another shot, but since I do have mutt working, I will probably stick with it for awhile.