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I've tried following the instructions here and here. Currently, I can read email from my GMail account, but not send—this is on a personal computer, so even if I configured Sendmail, I doubt any of the mail would survive the spam filter gauntlet. Both guides seem to require the --enable-smtp option for mutt, which I don't think is being exposed by ports. I've tried the mutt and mutt-devel ports and neither seem to give me that option.

On a far less important note, I also haven't been able to change folders, e.g., I get told that Sent Mail is not a valid folder when I attempt to go into it. If you can troubleshoot this problem, it's pure gravy. I really only care about sending.

Thanks,

Hank

UPDATE: For those who are interested, the mutt wiki has a GMailOverIMAP UserStory.

UPDATE 2: Although I finally solved my original problem (enabling SMTP support for mutt in FreeBSD), @grawity convinced me to use a relay and avoid mutt's native SMTP support. With that in mind, I went with msmtp. At that point, The Quick-N-Dirty Guide to Using mutt with gmail was very useful, including tips on how to enable OpenSSL for msmtp (so it can talk to GMail's SMTP servers, which use TLS).

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I wouldn't use the SMTP support in Mutt. <subjective> It's just not the Unix way. Much better is </subjective> to configure something like esmtp or msmtp or maybe nullmailer to relay email through Gmail's servers, and then let Mutt use the standard /usr/bin/sendmail way of sending messages.

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+1 for good suggestions, and for the tricky full-stop-spanning subjective tag. – coneslayer Apr 21 '10 at 18:54
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How likely is it that I'm going to get nailed as spam because I don't have a PTR record, my IP changes, etc.? – Hank Gay Apr 21 '10 at 19:07
Hank: You're still sending through Gmail's servers (that's what "relay" means). You'll just let a separate program handle that, instead of trying to make mutt do everything. So to answer the question, it won't affect spam score at all. – grawity Apr 21 '10 at 19:54
Do you also recommend using an MRA? – Hank Gay Apr 21 '10 at 20:17
Hank: Depends on whether you prefer all mail to be stored locally (~/mail/) or in Gmail's servers. Most MRAs do not support two-way synchronization, so using one would mean deleting mail from gmail.com after retrieval. Exception: offlineimap can work in both directions, and is useful because mutt doesn't cache IMAP messages. So you choose this time. – grawity Apr 21 '10 at 20:47
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up vote 1 down vote

If that config option is the issue (I don't know one way or the other), try building the mail/mutt port with:

$ make clean
$ make MUTT_CONFIGURE_ARGS=--enable-smtp
$ make install
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I still get errors telling me the smtp_url etc. are invalid after following these steps. I found the --enable-smtp option in the comments to shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/… but I could just be barking up the wrong tree. – Hank Gay Apr 21 '10 at 15:52
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up vote 1 down vote

The following sequence seems to work (hat-tip to The Quick-N-Dirty Guide to Using mutt with gmail, where I learned the -Doption trick for ports).

  1. cd /usr/ports/mail/mutt-devel
  2. make -DWITH_MUTT_SMTP install clean
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