mutt IMAP configuration for outlook.office365.com

[Sam Kuper]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 06:55:14PM -0500, Greg Marks wrote:
> my university e-mail account [..] uses outlook.office365.com [..]

Commiserations.  Universities used to be capable of hosting their own
email servers.


> It would be great to get some authoritative guidance on this!

Here is my guidance.  I would not call it authoritative!


> [..] The relevant part of my .muttrc file for this e-mail account
> looks like this:
> 
> source "/usr/bin/ccrypt -c <password_file>.cpt |"
> set imap_user=<username_local_part>@<univ_domain>
> set imap_pass="$password_variable"
> [..]
> set smtp_pass="$password_variable"
> [..]
> set smtp_authenticators = "login"
> account-hook $folder "set imap_user=<email_local_part>@<univ_domain> imap_pass=$password_variable"
> 
> [..] Up until recently this worked perfectly.  It began to fail,
> however, after I changed my e-mail account password to something
> containing a dollar sign, of the form abc$def.  This caused the mutt
> IMAP connection to fail, with error messages such as "Could not find
> the host outlook.office365.com," and no e-mail would be displayed.  I
> was able to fix these connection problems by escaping the dollar sign
> in the password, redefining $password_variable in the encrypted file
> to something of the form abc\$def. [..]
> 
> The remaining problem is that while this allows me to read e-mail, I
> am unable to send e-mail.  [..]

I suspect that that remaining problem occurs because email clients use
the SMTP credentials, not IMAP credentials, to send email.

I would suggest attempting the same workaround that you used for the
IMAP password.  I.e. escape the dollar sign in the smtp_pass field with
a backslash.

Let us know if this works.

Sam

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