Diff: MuttFastmailMailappMac
Differences between version 7 and predecessor to the previous major change of MuttFastmailMailappMac.
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| Newer page: | version 7 | Last edited on February 23, 2012 7:17 pm | by PhilHollenback | Revert |
| Older page: | version 6 | Last edited on January 28, 2009 1:58 pm | by PhilHollenback | Revert |
@@ -1,330 +1 @@
-!!! How to Use Mutt, ~FastMail, and Mail.app Together on Your Mac
-
-by Philip J. Hollenback %%%
-Originally
[published in MacDevCenter on January 18, 2005|http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/01/18/fastmail.html
].
-
-In many ways, the Mac is the best of two worlds. On the one hand, you
-have all the beautiful GUI-based programs that the Mac has always been
-famous for. On the other, Mac OS X is at its heart a Unix OS, so all
-the command-line tools are available as well. The result is an
-incredibly powerful and flexible platform.
-
-Like a growing number of users, I came to the Mac via Linux. I have
-been using various Linux distributions as my pr imary desktop for
-years. When it came time to get a laptop, I decided it was time to
-look at a Mac, because frankly I was tired of dealing with all the
-hardware issues Linux laptop users face (modems that don't work,
-unsupported wireless cards, and so on). The real question, however,
-was this: would I be able to combine my command-line environment with
-the graphical tools available on Mac OS X? The answer is yes, and in
-this article I describe one part of that integration: email.
-
-!! The Tools
-
-For years I have run my own mail server and managed my own
-mail. That's the mark of a real sysadmin, right? I won't deny it's a
-good learning experience, but I did get tired of dealing with things
-like spam, system upgrades, and backups. I just wanted to read my
-mail.
-
-Coincidentally, I was notified that the service I used to host my
-personal server was going away. Thus, it was the perfect time to shop
-around for a new email solution.
-
-I knew I wanted both a sophisticated web interface (for when I'm on
-the road) and access via the command line (for when I'm at home). On a
-friend's recommendation, I tried [FastMail|http://fastmail.fm] and was
-quickly hooked. ~FastMail offers a very powerful web interface, and you
-can also access your email with IMAP. That meant I could use any mail
-program that understands IMAP - which is pretty much any mail program
-these days.
-
-The obvious program to use was Apple's own Mail.app. While earlier
-versions of Mail.app were pretty rough around the edges and lacking in
-features, the current version is robust and powerful. Plus, I knew
-that it would take advantage of all the Mac niceties like easy image
-and HTML mail handling.
-
-But what about the command line? There was no way a Linux diehard like
-myself was going to give that up. I've been using the premier
-power-user mail program [mutt|http://www.mutt.org] for years. I did a
-little research and found that mutt ran on Mac OS X and could be
-easily installed via [Fink|http://fink.sf.net]. mutt supports IMAP as
-well, so I could see my tools were coming together.
-
-!! Installation
-
-Mail.app was already installed on my Mac, and setting up ~FastMail was
-as simple as signing up on the web site. I opted for a paid account so
-I could save more mail on the server. My plan was to move all my
-existing mailboxes to ~FastMail, which would require about 50MB of
-space. (The free ~FastMail account gives you only 16MB.) For a
-reasonable $25 per year, I got 600MB of storage on ~FastMail, as well
-as some other useful features such as ~SpamAssassin filtering. That was
-to prove very useful.
-
-Installing mutt was a bit more work. First I had to install Fink, the
-free software manager for Mac OS. Fink works with the Debian package
-manager apt to provide easy installation of all the standard free
-software from the Linux world. Installing Fink was simple: I just
-downloaded the [Fink binary installer|http://fink.sf.net] and ran
-it. Make sure to follow the documentation after doing this, because
-setting up your environment correctly requires that you do some
-work. After this, installing mutt was a simple matter of running
-apt-get in a terminal window:
-
-<pre>
-$ sudo apt-get update
-</pre>
-
-(to get the latest package list) and
-
-<pre>
-$ sudo apt-get install mutt
-</pre>
-
-To install mutt, I knew I would need a few helpers, so I also
-installed aspell, urlview, lynx, and unzip using apt-get as well.
-
-!! Configuration
-
-! Mail.app
-
-As usual, configuring the tools is the most time-consuming part of the
-process. Luckily, I documented the steps I had to take and can pass
-the savings on to you.
-
-To configure Mail.app, go to the =Mail->Preferences= menu and click on
-the Accounts tab. Then, click on the plus sign to create a new
-account. Change the settings as follows:
-
-[http://www.hollenback.net/writings/mail.app_account_setup.jpg]
-
-You have to now find a way to send mail out from your system. While
-it's technically possible to send mail directly from your Mac, it's
-generally better to relay it through a server. If you have paid for an
-upgraded ~FastMail account, you can use its SMTP server
-[as detailed
here|http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/ExternalMail.htm#ServerDetails].
-
-Alternately, if you have a .mac account, you can use that SMTP
-server. Finally, as a fallback, you can run a mail server on your
-Mac. Just be aware that this may result in problems - your mail will
-look much more like spam, and some consumer broadband networks block
-port 25.
-
-I use [Pobox.com|http://www.pobox.com] for mail forwarding, and it
-provides a free SMTP server too. Many mail services provide an SMTP
-server, so you should be able to find something. Also, consider using
-SSL if your server supports it. That way, Mail.app communicates with
-the outgoing mail server over an encrypted channel. That probably
-isn't terribly important, as once your mail gets to that server, it
-will be unencrypted for the rest of its journey anyway.
-
-[http://www.hollenback.net/writings/mail.app_smtp_server_setup.jpg]
-
-Once you have the account basics set up, move to the Special Mailboxes
-tab. Select all the check boxes on this screen to ensure that Mail.app
-places all its special mailboxes such as Sent and Trash on the server
-and doesn't store them on the local system.
-
-[http://www.hollenback.net/writings/mail.app_special_mailboxes_setup.jpg]
-
-Under the =Advanced= tab, select "Automatically synchronize changed
-mailboxes" and use the IMAP path prefix =INBOX=. You will use password
-authentication for that, and you can turn on SSL if you wish. That
-will encrypt the communications between the IMAP server and Mail.app.
-
-[http://www.hollenback.net/writings/mail.app_advanced_setup.jpg]
-
-Note that Mail.app and ~FastMail use slightly different naming
-conventions for some folders. Mail.app saves copies of sent messages
-to Sent, while ~FastMail uses Sent Items. The easiest way to fix this
-is to tell Mail.app to use the ~FastMail folders. In Mail.app, select
-each folder on the server you wish to use, and go to the =Mailbox->Use This Mailbox For= menu. For example, select Sent Items on the
-~FastMail server and Use This Mailbox For Sent. Here is the list of
-folders on each system:
-
-Mail.app folder |
- ~FastMail folder
-Trash |
- Trash
-Sent |
- Sent Items
-Drafts |
- Drafts
-Junk |
- Junk Mail
-
-That is all you should need to do to set up Mail.app to access your
-~FastMail account. Test by launching Mail.app and verify that you can
-send and receive mail.
-
-! Mutt
-
-It is possible to open IMAP folders in mutt without doing any further
-configuration. To test this, run mutt in a terminal window and press
-=c= to open a mailbox. Enter your Fastmail.fm mailbox in
-this format:
-
-<pre>
-imap://mail.messagingengine.com/
-</pre>
-
-When prompted, enter your ~FastMail username and password. While this
-is good for initial testing, it would be quite cumbersome to do this
-every time you wanted to change mailboxes. The solution is to place
-your IMAP server settings in the mutt configuration file
-=$HOME/.muttrc=. If you don't have this file, create it. Add the
-following entries:
-
-<pre>
-set imap_user=<your fastmail user>
-set imap_pass=<your fastmail password>
-set record=+"Sent Items"
-set postponed=+Drafts
-set imap_home_namespace="INBOX"
-set folder="imap://mail.messagingengine.com/INBOX"
-set spoolfile="imap://mail.messagingengine.com/INBOX"
-set mask="."
-</pre>
-
-Mutt will now go directly to your ~FastMail account on startup and
-won't ever ask for a username or password. This will also save a copy
-of all your sent and postponed messages on the server. This matches
-the settings in Mail.app (assuming you followed my instructions above)
-and in the ~FastMail web interface. This means that you can start
-editing a message in ~FastMail, save a draft, and then open it in
-Mail.app or mutt with no problems.
-
-!! It's Working - Now What?
-
-You are now set up to receive mail using all three
-applications. However, you probably can't send mail using mutt
-yet. The reason is that mutt, unlike many other mail programs, does
-not come with an integrated facility to send mail. Instead, it relies
-on your system mailer (sendmail). That works fine on traditional Unix
-systems. However, desktop computers are usually not configured with
-sendmail to send mail directly.
-
-You have two choices here. The first is to configure a full mail
-transfer agent (MTA) such as sendmail or postfix. This is usually
-overkill for a desktop system because it also sets up your system to
-receive mail, which you probably don't need (or want). A
-lighter-weight alternative is a send-only sendmail replacement such as
-sSMTP or esmtp. I recommend esmtp because it supports SMTP
-authentication. You will need authentication with most SMTP servers
-(~FastMail requires it). esmtp is currently not available via Fink, so
-you will need to build it from source. You can download the source
-from the [esmtp sourceforge site|http://esmtp.sourceforge.net]. After
-you install the esmtp program, create the configuration file
-_$HOME/.esmtprc_ containing the following (assuming you will be using
-the ~FastMail SMTP server):
-
-<pre>
-hostname = mail.messagingengine.com
-username = <your fastmail username>
-password = <your fastmail password>
-</pre>
-
-And add the following to your .muttrc:
-
-<pre>
-set sendmail=/usr/local/bin/esmtp
-</pre>
-
-Now mutt will hand outgoing messages off to esmtp. esmtp will then
-authenticate with the ~FastMail SMTP server and relay the message.
-
-!! But What About My Address Book?
-
-This is the one place where everything falls apart,
-unfortunately. There is currently no way to synchronize the address
-books between all three applications. The best you can do is access
-your Apple address book in mutt. To do this, download and install
-[contacts|http://gnufoo.org/contacts/] (a command-line interface to
-the Apple address book). Then add the following to your .muttrc:
-
-<pre>
-set query_command="contact -l -f%e %s"
-</pre>
-
-Then press =Ctrl-T= to complete addresses from your Mac address
-book. Note that this is not a perfect solution, as it doesn't return
-results in exactly the format mutt expects. The fix for this would be
-to create a wrapper script to adjust the results. However, it's a
-perfectly usable mechanism.
-
-Another alternative would be to run a regular cron job that uses
-contacts to build your mutt address book out of the Mac address book
-every night. The downside of that approach is you have to remember to
-never save addresses in mutt (because they will be overwritten the
-next time the cron job runs).
-
-At this time, there is no way to synchronize addresses between
-~FastMail and any other mail system. Hopefully the folks at ~FastMail
-will address this in the near future.
-
-!! Further Mutt Improvements
-
-One thing mutt lacks in comparison with other mail programs is IMAP
-header caching. Every time mutt needs to know something about a
-message on a remote system, it has to request the header again. This
-slows mutt down considerably (although in practice it isn't a
-showstopper).
-
-A solution can be found in the [unofficial mutt imap header caching patches|http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~sithglan/mutt/]. I
-have not tried these patches yet, but they seem well-supported as
-evidenced by the number of vendors who ship mutt with these patches
-preinstalled.
-
-Another mutt improvement would be to use SSL to encrypt communication
-with the IMAP server. In practice, this is not a huge concern because
-email is not particularly secure to begin with. However, if you are
-concerned about this, you should rebuild mutt from source and enable
-this feature. (The version in Fink has SSL turned off, probably to
-avoid legal problems.) This seems a worthwhile avenue to explore,
-especially since the ~FastMail IMAP server supports SSL. Once you do
-that, it probably also makes sense to build a version of esmtp that
-supports SSL as well so you can encrypt all mail to and from your mail
-server.
-
-!! Final Thoughts
-
-IMAP is a mature and robust protocol. The power of IMAP is that it
-acts as a generic mail transport and synchronization mechanism. As
-I've demonstrated in this article, you can easily set up three
-different mail applications to access a common mail store using
-IMAP. This gives you the flexibility to switch between applications as
-needed (or desired). Need to process and respond to a lot of text
-messages quickly? Use mutt. Need to deal with lots of graphics or
-HTML-formatted mail? Use Mail.app. On the road? Access your mail with
-the ~FastMail web interface. No matter what mechanism you use, your
-messages remain in one location.
-
------
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+Describe
[MuttFastmailMailappMac
] here.
version 7
Describe MuttFastmailMailappMac here.
