msmtprc settings for King’s College London email account

Marianne — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:55:44 +0000

Just to maybe spare someone some time. There’s a pdf on the KCL website with all the information you need, but it’s even easier just to cut and paste.

Note:

account kcl Can be something else, especially, can be “default” if you want it to be the default.
Replace “USERNAME” with your username, but make sure you leave the preceding kclad\ in there.
replace PASSWORD
tls_trust_file can vary depending on your system. This should work if you use Debian or Ubuntu and have the package ca-certificates installed. If you must, replace with tls_certcheck off
logfile setting is optional, but recommended

account kcl
host kclsmtp.kcl.ac.uk
user kclad\USERNAME
password PASSWORD
auth on
tls
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
port 587
logfile ~/.msmtp-log

Maintaining a whitelist of e-mail senders with local mutt and procmail on a server

Marianne — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:00:49 +0000

I run mutt locally on several different computers. OfflineIMAP automatically synchronizes the mailboxes, and that is a huge benefit. But I still had to set up a system that synchronizes my address books and mail settings. I’ve forgotten what exactly I am doing to accomplish this, and I now think there’s a small mistake somewhere that sometimes causes me to lose e-mail addresses from my address book. So I’ll write a little series in the category mail setup to document this on this blog, step by step, as I have time. This is the first instalment.

I maintain a whitelist of e-mail addresses to save spamassassin some work and myself some false positives.
To do this, I have a script that I run periodically (using crontab). The relevant lines of this script are (there’s some more stuff, since I also use it to blacklist things):

#!/bin/bash
ALIASFILE=$HOME/.mutt/.mutt.aliases
WHITELISTMAN=$HOME/.mutt/my_manual_whitelist
WHITELIST=$HOME/.mutt/my_whitelist
grep @ $ALIASFILE | cut -d "<" -f 2  | cut -d ">" -f 1 | grep -v " " > $WHITELIST
cat $WHITELISTMAN >> $WHITELIST
ping -c1 colobus.isomerica.net > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then
  exit 0
else
  rsync $WHITELIST isomerica:.procmail/my_whitelist
fi

The script just gets the e-mail addresses from my mutt alias file, combines this with any addresses from a manually maintained alias file, then uploads that to the server. On the server, the spam handling recipe in ~/.procmailrc does not pipe mail from these addresses to spamassassin, but everything else:

 :0fw
* ! ? (echo "$FROM" | $FGREP -f $WHITELIST)
| spamc
:0:
* ^X-spam-flag: yes
$HOME/.maildir/inbox/.Junk/

Linux etc. » Mail setup

msmtprc settings for King’s College London email account

Maintaining a whitelist of e-mail senders with local mutt and procmail on a server