11.1 Using GNU mailutils as an interface to mutt

GNU Mailutils is a collection of utilities for handling electronic mail. It includes lots of programs necessary for dealing with e-mail messages. One of them is mail.remote, which is designed as a drop-in replacement for sendmail to forward all mail directly to an SMTP gateway. Its interface is compatible with sendmail which makes the program especially useful as an interface between mutt and anubis. The package can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mailutils or any of the mirrors (See http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html for a complete list of these. Please, select the mirror closest too you). The complete information about the package is available from its home page at http://www.gnu.org/software/mailutils/

To use mail.remote, first download and install GNU mailutils (as usual the package is shipped with files ‘README’ and ‘INSTALL’ which provide the necessary guidelines). Then add to your ‘.muttrc’ file the following line:

set sendmail="mail.remote smtp://hostname[:port]"

where mail.remote stands for the full file name of mail.remote utility, hostname and optional port specify the host name (or IP address) of the machine running anubis and the port it listens on. Notice, that default port value for mail.remote is 25, which means that in most cases you will have to specify it explicitely.

For example, suppose you run anubis on machine ‘anubis.domain.org’ and that it listens on port 24. Let's also assume you have installed mailutils in the default location, so that full file name of mail.remote is ‘/usr/local/libexec/mail.remote’. Then, your ‘.muttrc’ will contain:

set sendmail="/usr/local/libexec/mail.remote \
              smtp://anubis.domain.org:24"

(the line being split for readability).

This document was generated by Sergey Poznyakoff on December, 20 2008 using texi2html 1.78.