Questions tagged [email]

Sending, receiving, reading, composing, sorting, and generally working with email. For the mail(1) command line utility, see the tag /mail-command.

This tag covers all issues related to email on unix systems, including:

mail-user-agent reading, composing and organizing mail in a mail user agent (MUA): alpine, kmail, mutt, thunderbird, …
mail-transport-agent sending and delivering mail with a message transfer agent (MTA): exim, mail-command (mail, Mail or mailx), postfix, qmail, sendmail, …
fetching remote mails with programs such as fetchmail
mda delivering local mail with a mail delivery agent such as maildrop and procmail
working with mail-related network protocols: smtp, ssmtp, pop3, imap, …
working with mail archives in mbox, mh, maildir or other format, with tools such as formail, …
mailing lists and mailing list software: mailman, …

If your question is about a specific program, use the tag for that program. For more generic questions, such as when you aren't sure which tool to use for a specific purpose, use a general tag such as email, mail-user-agent or mail-transport-agent.

1363 questions

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2 answers

Understanding /etc/aliases and what it does

This is the contents of the file /etc/aliases on my Debian (Wheezy) server, as it is: # /etc/aliases mailer-daemon: postmaster postmaster: root nobody: root hostmaster: root usenet: root news: root webmaster: root www: root ftp: root abuse:…

asked Feb 16 '13 at 19:38

its_me

13,959

votes

1 answer

What is the purpose of mail spools?

If I understand correctly, a spool is a temporary storage location. Traditionally, the mail is stored in a "mail spool", a mailbox in the /var/spool/mail directory, where users are expected to pick it up. Therefore, according to this view, once the…

asked Aug 18 '14 at 00:51

Ernest A

1,873

votes

6 answers

Is there a terminal command to determine if ISP blocks port 25 without actually setting up email server?

I am contemplating setting up an email server, but concerned that the ISP will block port 25. It would be nice to know that port 25 is / is not open before going through the effort to setup the email server. Is there a terminal command to determine…

asked Jan 04 '24 at 17:59

gatorback

1,384
23
48

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3 answers

Mail reader that displays any mbox file or Maildir

Is there a GUI-based mail reader that I can call with the path to an arbitrary mbox file or Maildir directory? In other words, a mail reader that does not insist on storing all mail in a single place in the file system? I'd like to store mail and…

asked Oct 17 '11 at 15:40

khinsen

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2 answers

Best way to archive attachments?

My saved-messages and sent-mail "folders" (actually Unix MBX files) are huge because of attachments, most of which I've saved to disk anyway. I want to keep the messages, but replace the attachment w/ a text file saying "Attachment removed:…

asked Mar 25 '11 at 16:53

user2267

votes

3 answers

How to view an email message file (located in a MailDir) from the command line?

I'm sure I once had a way to read email files from the commandline that was fall-off-a-log simple but I can't for the life of me find it again now. I have files in MailDir format, I wish to view their contents (headers, body (HTML/plain),…

asked May 13 '21 at 12:12

artfulrobot

2,929

votes

1 answer

How to set up local mail retrieval and delivery?

$ mail No mail for lazer $ I am able to send mails using mail. I have unread mails in my inbox as I can see in Outlook. Why doesn't mail show me my mails? How can I make mail fetch them?

asked Sep 12 '10 at 14:03

Lazer

35,307

votes

4 answers

Sending email without including an origin IP address in headers

I often see email headers like these when I get email these days: Received: by FQDN (Postfix, from userid $USERID) So does that mean that people SSH into their VPS and send email from there or is there a way of relaying email from my local computer…

asked May 19 '13 at 23:20

Kasey

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1 answer

How to clean a flooded mailbox

Today I opened my university mailbox, after several months of not opening it. I found it is flooded with about 300 K messages from the cron daemon, notifying me of a certain unimportant warning in a certain cron job. I stopped that cron job…

asked Jul 20 '15 at 08:30

Erel Segal-Halevi

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3 answers

Is it possible to have an outgoing SMTP server when port 25 is blocked?

I have a Debian machine (actually a Raspberry Pi) that I would like to use as a rudimentary, outgoing-only mail server over a residential connection, just for kicks. Port 25 is blocked. I would like to set it up as a standalone SMTP server, not a…

asked Apr 02 '14 at 05:43

katriel

votes

1 answer

reading offline Maildir archive with graphical email client

I have an archive of old emails in Maildir format. The directory (let's call it my_archive) has proper Maildir structure $ ls ./my_archive cur new tmp I am able read the emails with mutt by specifying the mailbox to load: mutt -f…

asked Feb 08 '14 at 16:04

Martin Vegter

votes

1 answer

Text-based mail client with usability

I have fond memories to using pine and emacs/rmail for reading mail in the 90's. At some point I switched over to Gmail plain HTML, but I recently realized I really miss navigating mail with cursor keys, replying with R, etc. And that QUICK, QUICK…

asked Sep 08 '13 at 11:57

forthrin

2,289

votes

3 answers

mbsync: Move subfolders to root

My mail provider (Fastmail) puts the folders I define in the webinterface inside the INBOX. Thus when I sync them using mbsync I obtain the following: INBOX - .Drafts - .Foobar But I would prefer having them one level above and parallel to the…

asked Apr 02 '14 at 14:44

mbbb

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1 answer

what are the caveats of sending email via the "mail" command?

I want to send emails from my work computers so that I can notify myself when various long-running tasks are completed. As I understand it, the command below looks up bar.com's MX record, makes a connection to the mail server and does SMTP to send…

asked Jul 28 '13 at 12:32

user3243135

votes

0 answers

Why is nullmailer appending my hostname to the recipient address?

I want to set up nullmailer to relay mail to my provider's SMTP. Since the provider drops email with mismatching sender's domain and user login, I used /etc/nullmailer/allmailfrom to match the login from /etc/nullmailer/remotes and it works, I can…

asked Mar 11 '19 at 22:52

FarO

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