Re: [gentoo-user] Mutt emerge USE flags for novice

["Paul B. Henson" <henson@acm.org>]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 02:09:57PM -0400, German wrote:

> Thank you, but are there anyone around who uses Mutt with gmail?

I use mutt with gmail IMAP and the following flags:

[ebuild   R    ] mail-client/mutt-1.5.23-r5  USE="berkdb crypt gdbm gpg
imap kerberos nls sasl smime smtp ssl -debug -doc -gnutls -idn -mbox
-nntp -pop -qdbm (-selinux) -sidebar -slang -tokyocabinet" 0 kB

I think the most important ones for gmail are imap, smtp, and ssl. I
believe imap and smtp are off by default, at least they were when I first
installed mutt, my package use flags are:

mail-client/mutt        sasl gpg imap smime smtp

I think kerberos is pulled in for me by a global use flag.

gpg and smime are only needed if you want to work with encrypted/signed
email. I don't think I needed sasl but left it there in case someday I
wanted to play with kerberos auth.

Relevant lines from my muttrc are:

set smtp_url="smtp://<username>@gmail.com@smtp.gmail.com:587/"
set folder="imaps://imap.gmail.com/"
set imap_user="<username>@gmail.com"
unset record
set postponed="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Drafts"
set spoolfile="=INBOX"
set header_cache="$HOME/.mutt/header_cache/gmail"

It works reasonably well. My main complaint is that it fairly regularly
drops my persistant connection and I need to reconnect. That's most
annoying when I just went through 100 emails and deleted many, and it
drops the connection before the delete has been synced :(. Other than
that it works fine.

We recently switched to office365 at work, and it has the same problem
with dropped imap connections. I'm not sure if they just both
occasionally boot annoying imap users who have hung out too long or if
mutt has issues with imap over a possibly flaky remote connection.

Good luck...