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Command line mail client [solved]


mandusr20071
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Does anyone have a working command line program for sending mail in Mandriva? I am using Thunderbird right now, and it takes forever to start up in machine and is really painful if I want to compose a quick email. I tried the nail (mail) program, and while it seems to receive email just fine, sending seems to be problem. If anyone has configured it send email using SMTP, please let me know. All the command line apps I have seen seem to use sendmail, which I don't have.

 

Any help is appreciated.

 

TIA.

Edited by mandusr20071
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have you tried mutt?

 

mutt(1) User Manuals mutt(1)

 

NAME

mutt - The Mutt Mail User Agent

 

SYNOPSIS

mutt [-GnRyzZ] [-e cmd] [-F file] [-g server] [-m type] [-f file]

 

mutt [-nx] [-e cmd] [-a file] [-F file] [-H file] [-i file] [-s subj]

[-b addr] [-c addr] addr [...]

 

mutt [-n] [-e cmd] [-F file] -p

 

mutt [-n] [-e cmd] [-F file] -Q query

 

mutt [-n] [-e cmd] [-F file] -A alias

 

mutt -v[v]

 

mutt -D

 

DESCRIPTION

Mutt is a small but very powerful text based program for reading elecâ€

tronic mail under unix operating systems, including support color terâ€

minals, MIME, and a threaded sorting mode.

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have you tried mutt?

 

+1 vote for mutt .. excellent client !!!

 

I also use mailx quite a bit for "quickies"

 

echo "my mail content, and body goes here" | mailx -s "This is my subject" paul@domain.name

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Another vote for Mutt. I've used it for years and it's got me spoiled. Abook is a nice companion to Mutt. Mutt setup is kind of a bear, but once you get it worked out there's nothing else like it. Haven't been able to get my wife off Thunderbird yet though.

 

BTW, it happens I use Mutt with sendmail, procmail and fetchmail to take advantage of more of what Mutt can do, which is a LOT. But you can use any of the other, simpler replacements for sendmail such as postfix, qmail, etc. And use of procmail and fetchmail is optional if you want to keep setup reasonably simple. If you want to give Mutt a try Google a bit for some sample muttrc (config) files or I can send you mine. It's pretty well notated and so fairly easy to work through.

Edited by Crashdamage
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I tried using mutt, but they are quite adamant about not supporting SMTP. They want people to use sendmail. I had downloaded some additional programs (msmtp) to work with mutt on this, but I found them quite flaky. If anyone here has gotten mutt working with SMTP, I will give it another go. I really don't need all the features mutt has to offer though, so if there is something simpler out there I would like to know. The problem with most of the UNIX programs are that they assume a working sendmail installation. And people also assume, I think, that the new Linux users wouldn't be interested in command line programs.

 

I would just use web mail, but I really need offline compose capability. I am using gmail right now.

 

Thanks for all the replies.

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mandusr200071 said:

 

I tried using mutt, but they are quite adamant about not supporting SMTP.

It's not really that they don't support it, it's that Mutt is a MUA (Mail User Agent) and does not include a MTA (Mail Transfer agent). Sendmail is an example of a MTA. It's the job of the MTA, not the MUA to send mail to a mail server be it POP, IMAP or SMTP. So, it's the MTA, not Mutt, that is configured to use SMTP.

The Mutt philosophy is much like the UNIX/Linux general philosophy: a tool for every job and only that job so everything is fixed just right, not one monkey wrench for fixing everything half-assed.

Now somewhat surprisingly, Mutt does have some built-in MRA (Mail Retrieval Agent) capability, but it's POP-only. For IMAP, etc retrieval you'll need a stand-alone MRA like fetchmail.

A MDA (Mail Delivery Agent) such as procmail can be added for more functionality, such as sorting incoming mail into several mailboxes or for several users.

 

They want people to use sendmail. I had downloaded some additional programs (msmtp) to work with mutt on this, but I found them quite flaky.

"They" don't want you to use sendmail, Mutt programmers don't care what MTA you use. You can use whatever MTA you want. I'd never heard of "msmtp" but a quick Google showed it's a simple MTA for replacing sendmail. You didn't say what other "additional programs" you've been messin' around with or just what you mean by "flaky".

If you can't make msmtp go I suggest you try configuring qmail to use SMTP for you. qmail, postfix - those and several other MTAs will work fine and very commonly used so plenty of trouble-shooting advice should be a Google away.

No doubt, sendmail is utterly configurable but horrendously complicated to learn. Fortunately, much simpler MTAs like qmail are drop-in replacements for sendmail in almost any ordinary circumstance.

 

The problem with most of the UNIX programs are that they assume a working sendmail installation.

Well, it might be better to say they assume a working MTA installation. Sendmail is just the original UNIX standard MTA and is still the standard and so just sorta referred to by default. Substitute "qmail" or whatever when you see "sendmail" and very likely you'll be OK.

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mandusr200071 said:

 

 

It's not really that they don't support it, it's that Mutt is a MUA (Mail User Agent) and does not include a MTA (Mail Transfer agent).

 

 

"They" don't want you to use sendmail, Mutt programmers don't care what MTA you use. You can use whatever MTA you want. I'd never heard of "msmtp" but a quick Google showed it's a simple MTA for replacing sendmail. You didn't say what other "additional programs" you've been messin' around with or just what you mean by "flaky".

 

I have used procmail before, back when I thought it could stop spam. Anyway, I find that this version of Mandriva I am using has msmtp as a standard package. I have managed to configure it to send email via hotpop, and a test email was sent successfully. Last time I had trouble getting it to work with gmail, so I will try that and post here. The error message at the time was:

535 5.7.1 Credentials Rejected

even though I had used the correct user name and password.

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