[UFO Chicago] mutt question -- Can it work disconnected from thenetwork?

[Brian Sobolak]

Jesse Becker wrote:
> --- William Scott Lockwood III <wsl3 at lrsehosting.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Pine.
>
> Pine makes nice building material.
>
>> ---==== [ Brian Sobolak ] ===---
>
>
>> > Can any text-mode (ie, mutt) clients do that too?  All
>> my mail is on an
>> > IMAP server, and I wouldn't mind synching some of it
>> down to the client
>> > where I'll run mutt.
>
> Yep, mutt can do this.  In fact, I do "offline" sending
> with Mutt all the time.  Basically, you run Postfix on
> system you run Mutt (in my case, this is my laptop).  Mutt
> is configured to use localhost as a mail relay.  Thus, as
> far as Mutt is concerned, mail is always delivered.  The
> onus of actually sending the mail elsewhere is placed on
> Postfix, and not the MUA.  Mail queuing is not really the
> responsibility of the MUA.

I thought of this later, after I had already sent the message.  You're of
course correct, that is the MTA's job.

> Poking around, I found a few mentions of "OfflineIMAP":
> http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/offlineimap/  which might
> be useful in your case.

Gopher!  Woot!

I might give this a shot:

<http://www.geocities.com/win32mutt/cygwin-ssmtp.html>

Basically this is close to my configuration.  Since it's a work laptop,
it's forced to run windows.  But I can run mutt under cygwin, and it
appears that sSMTP will work under cygwin too, which will relay the mail.

Another option might be to maintain a VM with my setup and mail; if I ever
need to forfeit the computer I can just copy the VM to another server and
still have the same config.  Then I could run a more legit copy of mutt
and postfix, which is better about mail relays.

> If you want a copy of my postfix or mutt config file, let
> me know off-list.
>
> This page:
>   http://dev.gentoo.org/~agriffis/email/
>
> Has information on using Mutt and offlineimap.

Thanks, I'll look at this.

>> > What I can't do is store all of my mail on the machine
>> where I connect
>> > from--work doesn't need to see my email.
>
> If that's the case, then you *must* compose the mail
> somewhere else, since it has to be stored *somewhere*
> before it is sent.  An SSH session to your own hosts, or a
> laptop would work fine.

It's not the composition I'm worried about, it's the archives.  I don't
want to store them locally, I want them on the IMAP box.  (Headers are
ok.)

brian

--
Brian Sobolak
http://www.planetshwoop.com/