date: 2016-01-21 20:12:29
Title: Setting up Mutt with Gmail
Been a bit sick lately, nowt particularly serious, just mystery
absecces in my skull and subsequent blood poisonings, so I've had
some time to waste getting around to the various computing tasks
that have been waiting for the delivery of Tuits^1. If you look
at your browser's address bar, you'll see that this site is now
being delivered over an encrypted connection, because of Ed
Snowden. Thanks to the wonderful Lets Encrypt[1] project, which
is an attempt to make encrypted internet connections ubiquitous,
by getting rid of payment, web server configuration, validation
emails and dealing with expired certificates, all in order to
significantly lower the complexity of setting up and maintaining
TLS encryption.
Setup was a little more complicated than I'd hoped, primarily
because I'm using nginx as my webserver, and I intend to do a
proper write up of this process soon.
All that messing about on the command line, however, just
reminded me how much I enjoy that environment and how much of my
computing nowadays is carried out in heavy-GUI environments. So,
I decided as an experiment to see how much of my day-to-day
computing I could accomplish on the command line.
First target, given the low-hanging fruit nature of a mad
experiment done when you're sick, was email, specifically,
gmail. I've been using gmail pretty much since it was launched,
and find it suits my needs just fine for the most part. I've also
been using two-factor authentication on the site since it was
available, which naturally added some complexity to a switch to a
command line client. I thought about my needs, and I decided I
definitely didn't want to keep a massive local dump of my entire
gmail inbox, dating back to April 2004, on my shell account. This
effectively means that more modern email clients, such as
'sup[2], are not really an option. I did consider Alpine[3]
for all of about ten seconds. Pine was the very first email
client I used, waaay back in the days of VAX/VMS, but a little
memory digging reminded me that I **hated** the interface. That
leaves me, in 2015, with Mutt[4].
As my internet shell is a debian box, installation of mutt was as
simple as an `aptitide install mutt`, although I admit I was more
than a little shocked at the dependencies, totalling some 65MiB
of downloads. Once that was done, I created some necessary
folders for mutt, and created a config file
mkdir -p ~/.mutt/cache/headers
mkdir ~/.mutt/cache/bodies
touch ~/.mutt/certificates
touch ~/.mutt/muttrc
I then went into my gmail account, and created an
application-specific password using the very friendly tools
Google provide for this specific purpose.
Then editing the `muttrc` file to include my gmail-specific
items:
set ssl_starttls=yes
set ssl_force_tls=yes
set imap_user = 'my_user_name@gmail.com'
set imap_pass = 'APP_PASSWORD'
set from='my_user_name@gmail.com'
set realname='My Name'
set folder = imaps://imap.gmail.com/
set spoolfile = imaps://imap.gmail.com/INBOX
set postponed="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Drafts"
set header_cache = "~/.mutt/cache/headers"
set message_cachedir = "~/.mutt/cache/bodies"
set certificate_file = "~/.mutt/certificates"
set smtp_url = 'smtps://my_user_name@gmail.com:APP_PASSWORD@smtp.gmail.com:465/'
set move = no
set imap_keepalive = 900
set sort = reverse-date-received
set sort_aux = reverse-last-date-received
The last two are for the purpose of having the most recent
messages at the top, the manner that gmail handles new messages
and, consequently, the way I've become used to these past 12
years.
Strange to say, it worked perfectly. Being back at the command
line has reminded me of the sheer power of mutt, and I've been
having a great time reacquainting myself with the MASSIVE
documentation for the client. Next tasks are to get gpg working
with it, and to have it thread messages in the same way that
gmail does. I'd also like to get it to work using my non-gmail
address, but that seems like it might be a tougher task, so falls
outside the parameters of my current experiment.
_______References_________________________________________________
[1]: https://letsencrypt.org/about
[2]: http://supmua.org
[3]: https://www.washington.edu/alpine/acquire/
[4]: http://www.mutt.org
_______Feetneet___________________________________________________
^1: Round, for the use of.