A month on the command line, Day 15: I get POP into mutt!!!

With the help of My First Mutt, I figured out how to import POP mail into mutt:

To browse a POP3 mailbox, just hit c to change mailboxes. Then, instead of typing the name of a local mailbox, you can enter the location of your POP3 server. This is much like typing the URL for a page in a web-browser:

pop://username@mail.example.com/

Mutt will ask you for your password and you can browse, delete, edit and save the messages as normal. If your POP3 mail account supports SSL encryption, then you should use pops:// instead of pop:// to enable it.

And it works for outgoing mail, too! I guess it's a lot to type, and there's probably a way to handle it through .muttrc, but getting ANYTHING to work is a giant step for me, and I'll just bask in the glow until tomorrow.

Again, I don't know how this works, but I can seemingly read the mail in mutt while it remains on the POP server, which is exactly how I want it for the time being. A total accident -- but freakin' brilliant.

I will post configuration files at some point in the near future. (Trust me, there can never be too many configuration files on the Web, even from one as inexperienced as myself).

To recap the programs I'm using, mutt brings in the mail from an IMAP server (and now from a separate POP server), and that mail is sent out via msmtp. I had some success with fetchmail and pine for the POP account, but I still can't get pine to send any mail. At some point I'll probably need to throw procmail into the mix.

The IMAP service I'm using is freelinuxemail.com (from the company that also offers fastmail.fm, except that freelinuxemail.com includes free use of an outgoing SMTP server. And for those who care about it, the identical Web interfaces for freelinuxemail.com and fastmail.fm are extremely quick to navigate and also very light on resources (with the option of turning CSS stylesheets off). And fastmail.fm was the first free e-mail service I've seen that promotes the use of IMAP, where the mail remains on the server and can be accessed by any number of mail clients from multiple locations -- instead of POP, which generally downloads all messages to the client computer, leaving you out of luck if you want to change mail programs or locations. For me, I'm reading e-mail in three different places on up to five different computers, so IMAP fits me a whole lot better.

For the past few years, though, I've been using Web-based mail services (chiefly Yahoo! Mail and our company's Web mail interface (which, ironically, is like having IMAP service, although for external mail clients we only have a POP server). But for the speed alone, it's nice to get away from Web interfaces and back to standalone mail clients.