New to Mutt, unable to send messages in *any* attempted way

[Sam Kuper]

On Thu, May 05, 2022 at 03:11:48PM -0500, xtec at trimaso.com.mx wrote:
> On Thu, May 05, 2022 at 12:07:44PM -0500, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
>> 1) On the command line, the shell will expand shell variables inside
>> double quoted strings, before Mutt even sees it.
>> 
>> So in the part "set smtp_url=smtp://$my_user@$my_url" Mutt is
>> probably only seeing "set smtp_url=smtp://@", because $my_user and
>> $my_url are unset in your shell.  You may want to use single-quotes
>> around the whole "-e" expression, but then be careful with nested
>> single quotes, e.g. the set from='User' part.
>
> First: had to delete/rename ~/.muttrc, because some previous settings
> were perhaps conflicting...

Good call.


> This seemed to *finally* work (had to play with both single and double
> quotes...):
> 
> printf "%b\n" "$msg" | mutt -s "Test message" -e 'set
> my_user="user at domain.tld"; set my_url="smtp.domain.tld"; set
> from="Send User <user at domain.tld>"; set
> smtp_url="smtp://$my_user:my_p4ss@$my_url:587"; set
> ssl_starttls="yes"; set ssl_force_tls="yes"' receiver at domain.tld
> 
> Finally worked -seemingly-

Great!


> but popped just many doubts:
> 
> ---There's a "sent email" log in local system, where sent emails are
> logged. There's always this line:
> Message-ID: < <alphanum_string.alphanum_string> @
> myLocalPCuser at localhost.myisp.com >
> Is this correct?

Almost certainly, yes.

Understandably, you may prefer not to divulge that information to the
recipients of your emails.

I forget how to effect that for the username part, but for the hostname
I think it's as simple as setting Mutt's `$hostname` variable.

If you have multiple accounts, you may wish to do that via hooks, e.g.:

send2-hook '~f @account1\.net$' 'set hostname = "account1.net"'
send2-hook '~f @account2\.com$' 'set hostname = "account2.com"'
send2-hook '~f @account3\.org$' 'set hostname = "account3.org"'

etc.


> ---Without "set from=" field, sender becomes
> "myLocalPCuser at localhost.myisp.com"... What is this?

That is a default value, derived from your system information.


> Does the "from" field kind of guarantee that email is being *really*
> sent from the user at domain.tld address, and not from *local rig*?

What do you mean?



> ---In "set smtp_url" field, if using "$my_user:my_p4ss" notation, this
> seems to override the "set smtp_pass" field completely?

Mutt has to make one of those override the other.  Otherwise, what would
Mutt do if a user specified one password in $smtp_url and a different
one in $smtp_pass?


> ---Seemingly not needed smtp_authenticators... ??

What do you mean?


> ---Without smtp_url and smtp_pass fields, where does email go?
> receiver at domain.tld doesn't receive it...

Depends on your system configuration.

Have you looked in /var/mail/<username> ?


> ---Is email really being sent with STARTTLS, as wanted? How can I
> tell?

Wireshark? :)

Probably there are easier ways - someone else might have suggestions.
Perhaps setting debug level to `-d 5` would give you the information you
need?


> ---In "set from=" field, spaces between "Send User" and actual email
> address... don't seem to matter?
> 
> 
> 
>> Are you able to send email via that account using other applications?
> 
> Yes, I used to use Heirloom Mailx.

Thanks for confirming.


>> Yes.  Whether or not you have to explicitly specify the port may
>> depend on the mail server's configuration.  This configuration can
>> vary from ISP to ISP.
> 
> I didn't mean email provider, but ISP internet service I'm connected
> to.
>
> And did test again: I connected to an internet network, did not
> specify port in smtp_url, tried send email, and got: Could not connect
> to smtp.domain.tld (No route to host) Tried connecting to a different
> internet network, tried to send email using *exact* command, without
> port, and *it succceeded*.
>
> WTH?

Does that behaviour happen consistently?  I.e. with one ISP connection
*never* succeeds without specifying the port, and with the other ISP it
*always* succeeds without specifying the port?

If so, then that is puzzling.  Hopefully someone else on this list can
offer a hypothesis.


Anyway, congratulations on your progress!

Sam

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