This is kind of my own Linux admin study notes. Like most of my other posts, it can be dry and boring;)

In an earlier post, I talked about my desire to compile Mutt and use it as my primary email client. Note there is a little more information on the comment section.

Things have changed a bit. Now my host server has been transferred to a new machine after I complained many, many times; and my site has been more stable since. So I am ok with it, for now.

I also discovered that Mutt is available on this machine. So is fetchmail and procmail. I configured fetchmail and procmail successfully to get my gmail. More tweaking is still needed, since all mail messages are dumped into one big file (no inbox, outbox, draft files, etc.), but I can at least read my gmail using Mutt. Judging from my limited experience with it, I do like Mutt. I think it is a great tool that can enhance productivity immensely. Together with vi, they are a great combo. Note to myself, I also need to do research on telling mutt to use lynx as the html reader, since a lot of emails these days are in html.

But I need a smtp client to send gmail. None of the common smtp clients, such as postfix, pine, sendmail, are available on this machine. Also, the fact I am not root complicate things.

Some Googling revealed that msmtp is a popular smtp client with TLS/SSL capabilities. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have root to my web host server, I decided to compile and install it on my own test box as a regular user to gain experience, before I make an attempt on the web host.

On my own test box:
1. useradd haidong –Create regular user haidong
2. passwd haidong –Give haidong a password
3. su haidong
4. ./configure –prefix=$HOME/msmtp –Avoid /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, and such
5. ./configure successful
6. make, make successful
7. make install, make install successful

Cool, it worked on my test box, which has Fedora Core 2. One funny observation is that there is a de folder in the locale directory. I guess the main writer of msmtp must be from a German-speaking region.

All right, now I am ready to try it on my web host. And it failed at the ./configure:( The message is
configure: error: C preprocessor “/lib/cpp” fails sanity check
See `config.log’ for more details.

I looked at config.log. It appears to be some kind of preprocessor error, stemmed probably from an older version of gcc on this box. I am not very proficient at C/C++ programming (my next big learning goal), so I will have to give up msmtp on this box, for now.

On to nbsmtp, another smtp client with TLS/SSL support. I suspect the results will be the same, but I don’t know for sure unless I roll up my sleeves and do it. Will report back after I am done.