zlinw@mcmedia.com.au writes:
How is outgoing mail set up done on a standard desktop system, a text based email client on the internet access machine is the only one that will be used. Hopefull something simple.
I would suggest something like mutt or notmuch. Personally I am a fan of notmuch. There are a number of different clients that will access the same data. I am using the emacs client - I suspect this is the best supported. The best way of describing it I can think of: text based open source email client that tracks threads similar how Google does. There are also python bindings to access mail, something I haven't looked at yet. As well as CLI tools, although these are somewhat low level and probably better suited for shell scripts as opposed to casual reading of your email. http://notmuchmail.org/ Packages in Debian stable. Some customization may be required for maximum efficiency for both mutt and notmuch. By default both these use sendmail on the installed system, which must be configured and working - although they can be configured to use SMTP also. For notmuch you will need to setup something else (e.g. with getmail) for retrieving email - while notmuch supports imap, it probably is better to retrieve emails and store then in a local Maildir. It works somewhat differently to how imap works, and keeps its own index of messages outside imap. I have seen mutt hang indefinitely when the connection to the outgoing SMTP server dies (actually not sure what happened, possibly the server died), which in turn resulted in me loosing my outgoing email when I had to kill mutt. So maybe don't use SMTP with mutt unless you can trust the connection and server. -- Brian May <brian@linuxpenguins.xyz> https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/