11.2 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 maidag — a general-purpose mail delivery agent (see maidag in GNU Mailutils Manual).

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 maidag, 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="maidag --url smtp://hostname[:port]"

where maidag stands for the full file name of maidag 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 the default port value for ‘smtp’ is 25, which means that in most cases you will have to specify it explicitly.

For example, suppose you run anubis on machine ‘anubis.example.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 the maidag utility is ‘/usr/local/sbin/maidag’. Then, your ‘.muttrc’ will contain:

set sendmail="/usr/local/sbin/maidag \
              --url smtp://anubis.example.org:24"

(the line being split for readability).

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