Marry mutt and gmail

I found one of my colleagues showing off a console tool to read/send emails, its name is mutt and it looks wicked cool, so I want it!

I'll pick gmail as mutt's husband here, as it's probably the most popular email service nowadays. After a few hours setup marathoon, I finally got mutt pulling off gmails on my laptop:)... well, still get some works to do on filter, though.

First thing first, get everything setup, it can be lenghty, but worth my time.
http://www.andrews-corner.org/mutt.html

To do it real quick,

1. Get mutt (obviously), procmail, fetchmail
2. Get Gmail's SSL certificate
$ openssl s_client -connect smtp.gmail.com:995 -showcerts
paste the "BEGIN...END" code to ~/.certs/gmail.pem

3. This gets a little tricky, as the article doesn't elaborate clearly.
If you are using a Debian/Ubuntu, the instructions there. If you're using other distros like me, here is the way to get it straight
$ locate mutt|grep bundle
/usr/share/doc/mutt-1.5.17/ca-bundle.crt

copy the first instance of "BEGIN...END" (there should be many), paste to: ~/.certs/equifax.pem

wierd name... I don't know what it means, just do it.

4. I will skip some long boring stuff, go directly to: http://www.thawte.com/roots/
where you'll obtain a zip file, which include the third and the last certificate.
Unzip the file, go to the Thawte Server Roots directory, issue:

cp ThawtePremiumServerCA_b64.txt $HOME/.cert/ThawtePremiumServerCA.txt


5. Now all certificates are set, you'll need a tool called c_rehash, a perl script comes with openssl package.

$c_rehash $HOME/.certs/
$openssl s_client -connect pop.gmail.com:995 -CApath $HOME/.certs/

Unfortunately, my distro Fedora 8 isn't generous enough to provide this tool, and I couldn't find one googling...Out of nowhere, I found a guy, who had the same problem, translated it to a sh script... and it actually worked. Check it out here:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.netbsd.devel.crypto/182

paste the script code .certs/c_rehash.sh, then:

$ chmod 744 c_rehash.sh
$ ./c_rehash.sh .
...

6. The hardest part ends here, the rest of works is all about setup the config files, just follow the article.

7. viola, mutt is online:)...

oh wait, I found my mutt, although working beautifully, couldn't handle the HTML mails...Fine, more googling ... ok, to get this done, I found this URL has very straightforward steps.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/75

Of course, this just gets mutt starting to work, mutt, is an extremely daunting tool for Linux /Unix newbies, as well as a great challenge to Unix vets.

However, the effort is worthy, remember the motto of mutt:
"All email clients suck, mutt sucks less" :)

Send an email with attachment:
$ mutt -s "Test mail" -a /tmp/attachment.tar.gz didi@toilet.com < /tmp/message.txt