A simple matter of…

I’ve recently changed my laptop and as it’s a small netboot, I’m running Ubuntu netbook remix on it. Today I’ve setup email on it and it’s a little involved so I thought it worth documenting.

First a little background – I run my own email servers and I like using “mutt” as my email client as it’s very fast, works well and just lets me concentrate on the content. Mutt runs in a terminal – it’s not a graphical program – so if I need to, I just ssh into my machine, run mutt, read email, send email and I’m done.

If I’m working remotely however things are a little more complicated. Firstly I like “mail-notification” as my tasktray icon – it is a good example of a small, well formed program. Unobtrusive, it displays a brief summary of new emails when they arrive (and with IDLE support it’s immediate). If I hover my mouse over it I receive a summary of unread emails, if one interests me then I click the icon to launch my my client.

However there is a licensing issue with mail-notification and linking against openssl so I have to recompile it with SSL support – a real nuisance. I turn off evolution support so that at least I don’t download a huge stack of build dependencies.

Now that’s setup and talking to my IMAP server over SSL, I have to run gconf-editor in order to enable the “always-display-icon” setting (my only gripe with the program apart from occasional crashes). Otherwise it only shows when there is unread email. /apps/mail-notification/always-display-icon is the key you want to enable.

mail-notification will launch your “preferred” email client when you select it, so you’ll probably want to change this from evolution (I won’t even start ranting about that program) to mutt, thunderbird or whatever. From your desktop menu, select Preferences -> Preferred Applications. Change the email client to “mutt %s” and tick the “run in a terminal” check box.

Finally we want to send email. Rather then running an email server on my laptop, I just use mutt’s built-in SMTP support to talk (over SSL and with a password) to my postfix email server. Hey presto, everything is nice and shiny.