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Every time I try to run Mutt in cygwin I get the following errors:

Error in /home/JJR/.muttrc, line 4: smtp_url: unknown variable
Error in /home/JJR/.muttrc, line 5: smtp_pass: unknown variable
Illegal instruction (core dumped)

And then I observe a stackdump file in my home folder. How can I get Mutt working with Cygwin successfully?

I tried visiting #mutt at irc.freenode.net which had dozens of people but no good answers, now including these two other channels which were surprisingly empty earlier: #cygwinx and #xwin

Oh, and my .muttrc was placed in /home, and not in /.mutt. I plugged in .muttrc in /.mutt and no error, however, composing and sending messages does not work. I modified the ~/.muttrc before evoking mutt.

Using: Windows XP SP3, Cygwin 1.7.9-1, Mutt 1.5.21

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Could you edit your question to include some info about what versions of Windows, Cygwin, and Mutt you're using? There are lots of tutorials on the internet on how to set up Mutt on Windows, so more information about your setup is necessary for anyone to be able to help you. – nhinkle♦ Jun 23 '11 at 4:01
Windose XP SP3, Cygwin 1.7.9-1, Mutt 1.5.21 – Innstanbul Jun 23 '11 at 4:14
@Innstanbul please edit your question to include that information, so that people can try to help you. – nhinkle♦ Jun 23 '11 at 4:17
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@Innstanbul I don't know the answer to your question; I'm just trying to help you improve your question so that it's more likely to get a good answer by somebody who does know how to help. You may also want to take a look at How to Ask for more details about creating a good question that will attract answers. – nhinkle♦ Jun 23 '11 at 4:25
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Where did you get mutt? From Cygwin's setup.exe? It may not have been compiled with SMTP support. You can execute mutt -v to see the options it was compiled with. – garyjohn Jun 23 '11 at 5:14
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up vote 3 down vote

I believe the Mutt with cygwin is configured and built without SMTP support. If you do

mutt -v

you'll see a list of configuration options used at build time.

Here's the output from my mutt,

$ mutt -v
Mutt 1.5.20 (2009-12-10)
Copyright (C) 1996-2009 Michael R. Elkins and others.
Mutt comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `mutt -vv'.
Mutt is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `mutt -vv' for details.

System: CYGWIN_NT-6.1-WOW64 1.7.9(0.237/5/3) (i686)
ncurses: ncurses 5.7.20091227 (compiled with 5.7)
libiconv: 1.13
hcache backend: GDBM version 1.8.3. 10/15/2002 (built Feb 26 2009 02:58:00)
Compile options:
-DOMAIN
-DEBUG
-HOMESPOOL  -USE_SETGID  -USE_DOTLOCK  -DL_STANDALONE  +USE_FCNTL  -USE_FLOCK
+USE_POP  +USE_IMAP  -USE_SMTP
+USE_SSL_OPENSSL  -USE_SSL_GNUTLS  -USE_SASL  -USE_GSS  +HAVE_GETADDRINFO

As you can see, it has -USE_SMTP which means there's no inbuilt SMTP support.

You should instead, install an MTA (mail transfer agent) and use mutt's inbuilt sendmail support.

I use the cygwin ssmtp package. If you install ssmtp, configure that to talk to your ISP's mail relay, and remove the smtp_* stuff from your .muttrc you should be good to go.

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