Coredump
Work, play, and everything in-between 

Gmail with Mutt

Posted in Play on 28 October 2008 | Comments?
Tags: cli, email, gmail, mutt, productivity

I love the command line. (It shows. Heh.) Coupled with `screen`, I also use `mutt` and `irssi` extensively. Only at home, though. At work, `screen` is more than enough.

I used to have `fetchmail`, too, but with the recent iteration of `mutt`, which fetches POP and IMAP (almost an MTA in itself now — my, my, look how it’s grown), I have fine-tuned my command-line experience, almost contrarian to the Unix philosophy of “doing one thing, and doing it well”. But, hey, I use whatever works.

Without further ado, here’s my very minimal .muttrc

# Gmail settings
set imap_user = "user@gmail.com"
set imap_pass = "password"
set smtp_url = "smtp://user@smtp.gmail.com:587/"
set smtp_pass = "password"
set from = "user@gmail.com"
set realname = "User Name"
set folder = "imaps://imap.gmail.com:993"
set spoolfile = "+INBOX"
set postponed="+[Gmail]/Drafts"
set header_cache=~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir=~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set certificate_file=~/.mutt/certificates
set move = no
set sort = 'threads'
set sort_aux = 'last-date-received'
set imap_check_subscribed
 
# Some tweaks
set imap_keepalive = 300
set mail_check = 90
set timeout = 15
set charset = iso-8859-1
 
ignore *
unignore From Date Subject To Cc
hdr_order Date From To Cc

If your Gmail space is a bit cramped, it may take a while to download all the headers, so tweak imap_keepalive, timeout, and mail_check accordingly. I know, imap_keepalive should be left untouched in keeping with the RFC default of 30 minutes, but I’m not sure Gmail even follows that.

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