configuring mutt

Richard Vickery richard.vickeryrv at gmail.com
Tue May 28 19:57:33 UTC 2013


On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 9:51 AM, Bill Oliver <vendor at billoblog.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, 27 May 2013, Richard Vickery wrote:
>
>  Sorry for the HTML code; I'm trying to fix it. However, I yum-installed
>> mutt and attempted to send the following email:
>> [snip]
>>
>
> Does this happen with all email, or only email to fedoraproject?
>
> Here's the obligatory "Hmmm... It works out of the box for me..." I hate
> reading that when I have a problem, but I feel obligated to let you know.
>
> I'm not a mutt expert -- I have it installed only so I can script
> broadcast emails from the command line -- but my impression is that it's
> like pine in that it's a client, not a server, and  uses the mail server
> software you have installed for sending (e.g. sendmail, postfix), and hands
> off to that.  The error message you gave looks to me like a server issue.
>  Do you have another client on that box, like alpine, that does work?
>
> Since the problem is a timeout, it sounds like the server is talking to
> fedoraproject, which means, to me, that mutt has handed it off.
>
> Here are some things that have screwed me over in the past:
>
> 1) The mailinglist only accepts mail with your name from one ip address or
> domain, and this ain't it.  Usually this gets a better error message than
> timeout, but I've seen it.
>
> 2) There's an authentication problem (this is the most common for me,
> particularly if I'm doing POP/IMAP stuff involving dovecot).  Again, this
> usually gets a better error message than a timeout, but I've seen it there,
> too.  A lot depends on how the servers are configured.
>
> 3) You do not have your client pointing to the correct server/MTA.  I've
> done this when I've had multiple domains and multiple servers behind one
> firewall/router.  I've also made the mistake of using "localhost" for my
> server when I didn't mean to, and had installed, but not set up, sendmail
> on my laptop as part of a default setup.  So, I kept trying to debug my
> "real" mail server and couldn't find a problem, when in fact my mail client
> was trying to use my unconfigured laptop as a server. Doh.  That's a day
> out of my life I'll never get back.
>
> 4) You do not have your domain correctly denoted, and so there's a
> mismatch (e.g. you are sending from "billoblog.com" but you are attaching
> "localdomain.")  That can cause some problems later on, though usually for
> me the error message tells me that the reverse lookup failed at the
> recipient site.  I also get this on occasion when sending mail through an
> ISP that returns the ISP domain on reverse lookup.
>
> 5) Fedoraproject's MTA was actually down when you tried to talk to it, and
> you just have bad timing.  It will clear up later.
>
> Since this is a bit of a touchy mailinglist culture here, I assume you'll
> get all sorts of flak if you send an empty test email using a direct
> sendmail or postfix command. Maybe there's a "test" address that the
> mailinglist advertises for debugging.  If so, I'd just do the old tried and
> true "/usr/sbin/sendmail -v somewhere at somedomain < /dev/null "  and see
> what you get.  If *that* times out, then it's not mutt that's the problem.
>
> billo
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I went to a site for configuration which suggested I install these three
packages, one of which we (Fedora) have abandoned in 2008 (may not be these
packages):

fetchmail msmtp procmail

Thanks for the help,

Sorry again about the HTML,

Richard
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