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Mimir's Head

Writing about this, that, and the other: projects, essays, art, design, and strange things. If you'd like to stay updated, follow the RSS feed!

For a complete listing of all posts, see here.

For updates to the Annotated Mountain Goats, see here.

"high blows Heimdallr, the horn is aloft
Odin speaks with Mimir's head
trembles Yggdrasil's towering ash
the old tree wails when the ettin is loosed."

On this page

• 2019
  1. I think you'll understand if you see the patient
• 2018
  1. On tattoos
  2. Migrating from Thunderbird to mutt, part 3: using email (mutt)
  3. Migrating from Thunderbird to mutt, part 2: sending email (msmtp)
  4. Migrating from Thunderbird to mutt, part 1: getting email (mbsync + davmail)

I think you'll understand if you see the patient

October 3, 2019

One of our CT techs put this up in the scanner control room. I love it.

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On tattoos

June 28, 2018

thanks to Suze Shore

Yes.

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Migrating from Thunderbird to mutt, part 3: using email (mutt)

June 19, 2018

If you haven't read part 1 and want to receive mail, see here!

If you haven't read part 2 and want to send mail, see here!

The totality of configuring mutt is complex, but I want to help provide the basics of configuring a two-account system that can send and receive email. Once you can do that, you can figure out the rest as you explore the program, read the manual, and decide what you like and need. At this point, this isn't particularly different than configuring any other multi-account mutt profile.

Here's a basic .muttrc, containing only the necessary elements for multiple accounts and a few options that I think are nearly essential. There's lots more that could or should be in here for a full-fledged setup, but I don't want to confuse things unnecessarily!

# Who am I?
set realname = "Buckaroo Banzai"
set use_from

# Accounts
folder-hook home 'source ~/.mutt/muttrc.home'
folder-hook work 'source ~/.mutt/muttrc.work'

# Start on home account
source ~/.mutt/muttrc.home

# Mailboxes
set mbox_type = Maildir
set copy
mailboxes ~/mail/home
mailboxes ~/mail/work

This requires two additional files which will be loaded whenever you are in directories which match the regex home and work, which we previously set up to be the locations mbsync delivers mail to. You can call them whatever you want and put wherever you want; putting them in a ~/.mutt directory and calling them muttrc.{home,work} is just the pattern I use.

These set the values for each folder:

# muttrc file for home account

set from = "plugh@xyzzy.org"
set hostname = "xyzzy.org"
set folder = "~/mail/home"
set signature = "~/.signature"
set sendmail = "/usr/bin/msmtp -a home"

set spoolfile = "+Inbox"
set postponed = "+Drafts"
set record = "+Sent"
set mbox = "+Archives/`date +%Y`"
save-hook . "+Archives/%[%Y]"
set trash = "+Trash"

color status green default

and

# muttrc file for work account

set from = "thud@yoyodyne.com"
set hostname = "yoyodyne.com"
set folder = "~/mail/work"
set signature = "~/.signature-work"
set sendmail = "/usr/bin/msmtp -a work"

set spoolfile = "+Inbox"
set postponed = "+Drafts"
set record = "+Sent"
set mbox = "+/Archives/`date +%Y`"
save-hook . "+Archives/%[%Y]"
set trash = "+Trash"

color status blue default

I like changing the status colors to help remind myself where I am — the first color is the color of the text, the second is the color of the background — but this is obviously not necessary.

Unfortunately, even if both accounts technically use the same regex (for example, both use set spoolfile = "+Inbox", "+" being a shortcut for $folder), you can't simply set this once in .muttrc and be done. Mailbox shortcut expansion is done when the file is loaded, not when the regex is evaluated, so setting it once in .muttrc wouldn't allow it to switch between mailboxes when the folder-hook is evaluated.

mutt's default save behavior is to append to $mbox without sorting archived mail further. I like Thunderbird's behavior of sorting by year, and the above mbox and save-hook settings accomplish this. This solution is thanks to Daniel Schömer on mutt-users and I have to admit that I don't fully understand it (if you do, I'd love an explanation). It appears to be smart enough to archive based in the year the message was sent, and that's exactly what I wanted.

Hope this series was helpful! If you have questions, please feel free to email me.

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Migrating from Thunderbird to mutt, part 2: sending email (msmtp)

June 19, 2018

If you haven't read part 1 and want to receive mail, see here!

For configuring mutt for multiple accounts, see part 3!

Fortunately, configuring msmtp to send mail is substantially easier than getting mail. Here's an example ~/.msmtprc:

defaults
logfile ~/path/to/msmtp.log

account home
host mail.xyzzy.org
port 587
protocol smtp
from plugh@xyzzy.org
auth on
user plugh
passwordeval gpg2 -q --for-your-eyes-only --no-tty --batch -d ~/.mail-home.gpg
tls on
tls_starttls on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt 

account work
host localhost
port 1025
protocol smtp
from thud@yoyodyne.com
auth login
user thud
passwordeval gpg2 -q --for-your-eyes-only --no-tty --batch -d ~/.mail-work.gpg

account default : home

where, similar to before, mail.xyzzy.org, plugh@xyzzy.org, plugh, thud@yoyodyne.com, and thud are the locations of your home SMTP server, your home email address, your home login, your work email, and your work login respectively. Usually passwordeval can use the same command as for mbsync, assuming your IMAP and SMTP passwords are the same. Also, you don't have to use the same account names as you did with mbsync, but it's probably easier if you do.

The bottom line sets the account default, meaning that if msmtp is run with no other qualifications, mail will be set using that account (here, home).

To test your configuration, you can try

$ echo "cheese" | msmtp -a work bigboote@lectroids.com

obviously using a different email address that you can check. If it goes through and works for both accounts, you're good!

Additionally, for log maintenance, I added the following to my crontab, similarly to before with mbsync:

@weekly  cd $HOME/mail/logs && echo "$(tail -1000 msmtp.log)" > msmtp.log

For configuring mutt for multiple accounts, see part 3!

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Migrating from Thunderbird to mutt, part 1: getting email (mbsync + davmail)

June 19, 2018

I've become increasingly frustrated with the limitations of Thunderbird, and finally started taking the steps to migrate to a more powerful email client, mutt. This had been daunting for some time as Thunderbird handles a lot of the behind-the-scenes work for you — retrieving email (it's a mail delivery agent, MDA), sending email (and a mail transfer agent, MTA), and other things besides in addition to being a mail user agent (MUA). mutt, in contrast, is more or less a straight MUA, so you have to figure out how to fill those roles.

Fortunately, there's great software and lots of guides out there to help with this. Unfortunately, my work's mailserver is Micro$oft Exchange, which uses Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) with IMAP and SMTP disabled. I wrote this up to hopefully help other users in similar situations configure their systems successfully.

Overview

I use Ubuntu GNU/Linux; while the specifics and installation might be different on other platforms, I think the general framework will hold. My kernel and release info:

$ uname -rio
  4.4.0-128-generic x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ lsb_release -dc
  Description:	Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS
  Codename:	xenial

Here's the way my system is now set up:

I'm very grateful that davmail exists. It's a simple Java program that provides an IMAP/SMTP frontend locally and then interacts with an EAS server. I'm not aware of a good alternative — if you are, please reach out!

mbsync and msmtp are wonderful, lightweight IMAP and SMTP clients, respectively. mbsync is sometimes referred to as isync, its historical name. The installation package is still isync on many platforms (including Ubuntu), but the executable is mbsync. You can certainly use more classic MTAs like sendmail, but for a single-user system my impression is that it's unnecessarily complex.

Installation

On Ubuntu, all are available on the repos as of 18.04 LTS (bionic beaver). For 16.04 LTS, mbsync and msmtp are available, however, some of the features used in my configuration of mbsync are only available in newer versions, and so I compiled from source. davmail has a .deb package which you can easily install with dpkg on its website.

If you're on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, you should be able to simply

$ sudo apt install davmail isync msmtp mutt

without issue, but as upgrades won't be released until late July 2018, I haven't tried this yet.

Incoming mail (EAS/IMAP) — mbsync + davmail

davmail installation is blessedly uncomplicated. By default, it accepts IMAP and SMTP locally on ports 1143 and 1025 respectively. You have to set the URL for your Outlook Web Access (the way you access your email in a browser, which should end with /owa/ — for example, https://mail.yoyodyne.com/owa/), and the destination for davmail's logfiles. All of this information is stored in .davmail.properties and can be easily re-edited there.

To have davmail start on boot without the tray icon, you can add

/usr/bin/davmail -notray

to your startup applications.

mbsync has a more complex setup that I don't begin to fully understand. However, once configured, it runs easily, and you can easily have multiple accounts. ¹ A two-account .mbsyncrc using davmail looks like this:

IMAPAccount home
Host mail.xyzzy.org
Port NNN
User plugh
PassCmd "gpg2 -q --for-your-eyes-only --no-tty --batch -d ~/.mail-home.gpg"
SSLType STARTTLS

IMAPStore home-remote
Account home

MaildirStore home-local
Subfolders Verbatim
Path ~/mail/home/
Inbox ~/mail/home/Inbox

Channel home
Master :home-remote:
Slave :home-local:
Patterns * !Archives !Lists

Create Both
Expunge Both
SyncState *

##########

IMAPAccount work
Host localhost
Port 1143
User thud
PassCmd "gpg2 -q --for-your-eyes-only --no-tty --batch -d ~/.mail-work.gpg"
SSLType None
AuthMechs LOGIN

IMAPStore work-remote
Account work

MaildirStore work-local
Subfolders Verbatim
Path ~/mail/work/
Inbox ~/mail/work/Inbox

Channel work
Master :work-remote:
Slave :work-local:
Patterns * !Archives

Create Both
Expunge Both
SyncState *

where mail.xyzzy.org, NNN, and thud represent your mailserver address, port number, and Exchange username, respectively.

A few comments:

• You can call your accounts whatever you want, I just chose home and work as examples. You just have to be consistent throughout.

• You can put any command that generates your password in PassCmd (for example, accessing the system keyring). To generate an encrypted password file with GPG, one easy way is

  $  echo 'password' | gpg2 -r plugh@xyzzy.org -e -o output.gpg
  

  On most terminals, prepending a space prevents this from being stored in your history, but it's worth checking and deleting the entry if possible so your password isn't stored anywhere in plaintext.

• Subfolders Verbatim creates an identical folder tree for your local Maildir as what you have on your mail server. There are lots of other options!
• You can of course choose different locations for Path and Inbox than these.
• Patterns * will match all of your remote folders and treat them as Maildirs, meaning that locally those files will have cur, new, and tmp subdirectories. You can exclude directories by prefixing them with !. Here, I have subdirectories of Archives and Lists which are each Maildirs, but I want to exclude those so they aren't treated as Maildirs. The subfolders are still synced without issues.
• For the work account, the Host and Port fields are the defaults for davmail.
• If you have to log in with a domain, you have to use two backslashes (e.g. DOMAIN\\thud) to escape the backslash.
• While you're testing things, you may want to comment out Expunge Both. This actually removes deleted files rather than simply marking them as being deleted, so it's more permanent.
• For the work AuthMechs, davmail accepts LOGIN but not other forms without more configuration. I don't think there's much issue with this on a small system as all the data transfer is local, but there may be ways to encrypt it locally as well if you like.

And you're set! Now, to sync, you can run mbsync home, mbsync work, or mbsync -a for all mailboxes. I have it set to sync my mail every two minutes with the following entries in my crontab:

*/2 * * * * mbsync -a 2>>$HOME/mail/logs/mbsync.log 
@weekly  cd $HOME/mail/logs && echo "$(tail -1000 mbsync.log)" > mbsync.log

You can omit the logging of stderr and the second entry (which just periodically trims the log) if you don't want any logging.

For sending mail, see part 2!

For configuring mutt for multiple accounts, see part 3!

Footnotes

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