Like many sane people, I have a soft spot for little C programs with little config files that do exactly what they do and nothing else. Martin Lambers' POP3 and SMTP clients, mpop and msmtp, are perfect examples.

In my quest for a minimal and straight forward setup, these bad boys have become my daily email handlers, with mpop downloading my emails into a Maildir at ~/.mail, mutt being a mostly offline interface to deal with all the crap people send me, and msmtp as the backend to send mail from mutt.

mpop can be run as a cronjob, downloading mail every 30 minutes, leaving no trace on the remote server (if I trust my provider, that is).

setup

mpop and msmtp can be installed from your distributions repos via the usual route.

Both programs have sane defaults that would work well for a standard user, so the configuration files are very few lines and take only a minute to write.

On top of that, they both share a chunk of code and its corresponding options, resulting in a good bit of the two files sharing lines.

My config for mpop, for example, is simply:

defaults
uidls_file "~/.config/mpop/uidls_%U_at_%H"
tls on
tls_starttls off

account posteo
host "posteo.de"
user "<myemailaddress>"
passwordeval "gpg --no-tty -q -d --for-your-eyes-only ~/.mail/posteo.gpg"
delivery maildir "~/.mail/posteo/INBOX"
port 995

Compared to my nearly identical msmtp config:

defaults
auth on
tls on
tls_starttls off

account posteo
host "posteo.de"
user "<myemailaddress>"
from "<myemailaddress>"
passwordeval "gpg --no-tty -q -d --for-your-eyes-only ~/.mail/posteo.gpg"
port 465

The first 4 lines of each are the defaults, which apply to all email accounts that are set up. The second block is therefore my first account, in this case just named posteo for my provider. Everything is simple and self explanatory. Of note though is the passwordeval lines, which is simply a shell line executed that should give you the password for that account, in this case taking it from my gpg-agent.

torifying

Both programs can be run straight through Tor with no trouble at all, just stick this into the defaults sections:

proxy_host localhost
proxy_port 9050

After 2 minutes of setup, these programs can work in the background and never ask for your attention again.

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms, feel free to reach out on mastodon or by email ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ