How to setup email in linux

April 04, 2018

There are a multitude of options out there - main of which is msmtp which can be used with a higher level mailing program like mutt or sendmail or standalone as well.

Sendmail

First, we configure the ~/.msmtprc file.

A typical configuration looks like follows:

# Set default values for all following accounts.
defaults
auth           on
tls            on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
logfile        ~/.msmtp.log

# Gmail
account        gmail
host           smtp.gmail.com
port           587
from           username@gmail.com
user           username
password       plain-text-password

# A freemail service
account        freemail
host           smtp.freemail.example
from           joe_smith@freemail.example
...

# Set a default account
account default : gmail

After this, you can send a mail as

$ echo "hello there username." | msmtp -a default username@domain.com

Otherwise, you can add the mail contents in a text file such as:

To: username@domain.com
From: username@gmail.com
Subject: A test

Hello there.

and send the mail as:

$ cat test.mail | msmtp -a default <username>@domain.com

I have not been able to get it to work without the -a default set, even though the config file includes the default mail account.

Protecting password

The previous version has the password written openly in the config file. We can encrypt the password using gpg