Sending Mail

***Narrative

You can skip this part if you only want to know how to get sending mail working on your pi.

There was a person who contributed to Hacker Public News (I think they used a fictional character's name) who once wrote that all instructions on the Internet had incorrector missing information in their tutorials. I certainly have found this to be true in this extended saga.

In my physical space, I have a pi at a computer stand on one side of the room and a ChromeBook on the other. I did a lot of walking back and forth. I use the ChromeBook to search the Internet and copy items of interest. Now when I search, I always get an AI overview. In general, I find these overviews to give me the information I need, but not this time. The information was often outdated or incorrect.

I have also come to the conclusion that pages on the ArchLinux wiki do not first give you the basics but are delighted to give you lots of other things you can do without stressing what you actually need to get up and running.

Finally, it often takes me a while to realize what part of the examples are required text and which are placeholders.

Take for example the line:

account gmail

In this case, gmail is an arbitrary name. I could put squirrel or arugala even when I am defining a gmail account.

I have spent days searching, installing, uninstalling and puzzling over errors. Rince and repeat.

OK, on to the way to get it working.

***Introduction

I wanted a way to move some files off of my raspberry pi onto cloud services like OneDrive and Dropbox. Instead of configuring rclone or a similar service, I figured an email attachment would work just as well. (I totally forgot I could copy files to my PC with scp.) I wanted something quickly and not necessarily elegantly to get the job done.

***Installation

You need to install three programs:

• msmtp
• msmtp-mta

• s-nail

  sudo pacman -S msmtp mstp-mta s-nail

That's it! Nothing from the aur.

Two caviots here:

1. If you are using gmail to send your messages, you will have to create an app password for your account. Your regular password will not work.
2. I did not hide this app password in a key ring. I learned the default program secret-tool requires that a desktop needs to be installed. I didn't want to use gpg or a password manager. Is someone really going to break into my house or network and interrogate my raspberry pi to get into my gmail?

***The .mailrc file

Create a file named .mailrc.Include this line:

set mta"/usr/bin/msmtp"=

***Configure MSMTP

Create a file called .msmtprc.Here is the configuration file that finally worked for me.

auth on
tls on
tls_starttls on
tls_certcheck on
logfile ~/.msmtp.log
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
from your-email-address
user your-email-address
password your-app-password

This is the barebones I could get away with.

***Change File Permissions

You must change permissions on the .msmtp file if it contains a password.

sudo chmod 600 .msmtprc

***Sending a Message

To test this configuration, I used the following command. I sent the message to a different email account from the one I configured in .msmtprc.

echo “This is only a test.” | mail -s “Test Message" -a sending-mail.md receiving-msg-account

This is one line and includes attaching this file to the email. d spirit