[William Shotts <bshotts@pa...>]

In this installment, we'll finish up our look at email.

Now that we have mutt talking to the outside world, it would be handy
if we could also send messages from the command line as we did in Part
8 using the mail command. Fortunately, mutt supports the same technique.

Using mutt On The Command Line

We can send the output of a command to a remote email recipient via our
POP3 configuration using a command such as this:

me@...:~$ ls -l | mutt-p -s "test message" someone@...
Here we used the alias "mutt-p" described in the previous installment.
Please note that if such an alias were used in a shell script, it would
most likely fail because the .bashrc file where the alias is defined is
not sourced by the copy of the shell executing the script. In such a
case, we would need to spell the command out fully:

mutt -F ~/.muttrc-pop3 -s "test message" someone@...
Another Mail Client

While Debian installs mutt by default, it's not the only full-featured
text-based email client available. Another popular choice is Alpine,
the successor to the popular PINE email client from the University of
Washington. Alpine is similar to mutt in most respects though I think
it has an easier user interface:


In addition to the usual email functions, Alpine also sports its own
address book and Alpine's configuration is adjustable from within the
user interface so that editing the configuration files is not strictly
necessary, but its configuration is as complicated as mutt's.


Alpine configuration, top-level


Alpine configuration, down deep

Summing Up

Text-based email clients have a long and storied history in the Unix
world and remain the tools of choice for serious email users. As you
dig deeper into the documentation of mutt and Alpine, you will find
that nothing compares to the configurability of either of these
programs.

Further Reading

More support resources for mutt:

- http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/

- http://therandymon.com/woodnotes/mutt/using-mutt.html

- http://hacktux.com/mutt/addressbook

- http://mark.stosberg.com/Tech/mutt.html
For Alpine:

- http://www.washington.edu/alpine/

- http://www.washington.edu/alpine/tech-notes/config.html

- http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/


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Posted By William Shotts to LinuxCommand.org: Tips, News And Rants at
2/05/2010 12:47:00 PM