Introduction
I have this weird hobby of trying to get good unix tools to run natively on Windows. I find this is the most efficient use of my laptop's resources, and therefore the nicest experience. WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2. Getting unix tools to work correctly under MSYS2 is a challenge, as we'll see, and for me, that's part of the fun.
Prerequisites
These prerequisites are not just to use mutt, but to use msys2 successfully in any capacity for development or other work. These are the steps I follow to maximize my chances of success with msys2.
- Msys2 needs to be installed. I like to use scoop to install it (and everything else on Windows, preferably). Just be sure to run
scoop hold msys2. You do NOT want scoop reinstalling msys2 every half second for "updates" when you can just runpacman -Syuinside msys2 to get all the needed updates from there. - There should be no spaces in your USERPROFILE path. I know this is hard, but
it's worth it. I usually do this by creating a local user named
nospacesor something, logging in to that user, and only THEN logging into my Microsoft Windows account after myC:\Users\<me>folder has been created, etc. - Your MSYS2 installation should have this as its
/etc/fstab, as the One True Way of ensuring your MSYS2 home directory is also yourUSERPROFILEdirectory:
# For a description of the file format, see the Users Guide
# https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#mount-table
# DO NOT REMOVE NEXT LINE. It remove cygdrive prefix from path
none / cygdrive binary,posix=0,noacl,user 0 0
C:/Users /home ntfs binary,posix=0,noacl,user 0 0
If you used scoop to install msys2, you can put the above file under C:\Users\<you>\scoop\apps\msys2\current\etc\fstab and it should work.
Instructions
- From a mingw64 MSYS2 prompt, type the following to install gpg, mux and msmtp:
pacman -S gnupg mutt mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-msmtp w3m
- We configure mutt as per usual, but I found that mutt can't send emails
for some reason. So configure it to use msmtp for that part, and then
everything works. Here is my gmail config (found under
~/.mutt/home.account):
set imap_user = "djhaskin987@gmail.com"
set folder = "imaps://imap.gmail.com/"
set spoolfile="+INBOX"
set postponed = "+[Gmail]/Drafts"
set record = "+[Gmail]/Sent Mail"
set trash = "+[Gmail]/Trash"
set imap_pass = `multipass imaps://imap.gmail.com:993/`
set realname = "Daniel Jay Haskin"
set from="djhaskin987@gmail.com"
set sendmail="/mingw64/bin/msmtp -a home"
set crypt_use_gpgme
set pgp_default_key="443A163BD11CEAE798BAAB94D7268D49D06594F4"
source ~/.muttrc
In this file, I use a shell script called multipass that looks up passwords from KeePassXC using git-credential-keepassxc.
We also see that I use msmtp configured to send using the home account.
Here is my msmtp config:
defaults
auth on
tls on
tls_trust_file C:/Users/bhw/scoop/apps/msys2/current/usr/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
logfile ~/.msmtp.log
account home
host smtp.gmail.com
port 465
tls_starttls off
from djhaskin987@gmail.com
user djhaskin987@gmail.com
passwordeval "C:\Users\bhw\Executables\multipass.bat smtps://smtp.gmail.com:465/ djhaskin987@gmail.com"
account migadu
host smtp.migadu.com
port 465
tls_starttls off
from dan@djhaskin.com
user dan@djhaskin.com
passwordeval "C:\Users\bhw\Executables\multipass.bat smtps://smtp.migadu.com:465/ dan@djhaskin.com"
account default: home
The msmtp program has to use a different
multipass
because it is "Windows aware" and NOT "msys2 aware",
having not been compiled with the "msys2" subsystem, but rather with the
"mingw64" subsystem. While we're on that subject, that file (above) must be
written to ~/msmtprc.txt on Windows, another gotcha I had. It's this
back-and-forth windows-not-windows fence upon which msys2 teeters that makes
it so important to have the msys2 home directory the same as the "windows"
home directory. I find it makes things less confusing at times.
Finally, here is my ~/.muttrc:
set move = no
set confirmappend = no
alternative_order text/plain text/html
auto_view text/html
set mailcap_path = ~/.mailcap
set envelope_from=yes
Anyway, then I'm able to fire up and use mutt in the msys2 mingw64 terminal:
mutt -F ~/.mutt/home.account