Living in Emacs

April 13, 2009    emacs gnu gnus org-mode

E-Mail, News, Editing, Writing, Programming,… Since a few year now I use GNU Emacs for almost everything i do regularly on my computer. But there is still so many to discover and learn. The last few weeks I started to use org-mode for notes, ToDo lists, etc and i really love it. Especially the feature to link from your ToDo list or note directly to an mail in Gnus. Just copy (C-c l) the link to the mail in Gnus and insert (C-c C-l) it into the note. Now I can click on the link in my ToDo list and Emacs will show me directly the corresponding mail/thread in my mail client. Great!

As already said, for mails and news I use Gnus. Until now I always set up postfix as my Mail Transport Agent (MTA). Only today I learnt that Gnus is able to send e-mails directly without an external MTA. The only pitfall, you have to install gnutls-bin and starttls to use SSL/TLS. Otherwise it will not work and you will not get a meaningful error message. After that it is fairly easy. I just had to enter this into my ~/.gnus:

(setq smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp-server")
(setq smtpmail-smtp-service 25)
(require 'smtpmail)
(setq message-send-mail-real-function 'smtpmail-send-it)
(setq smtpmail-auth-credentials
 '(("smtp-server" 25 "user" "passwd")))
(setq smtpmail-starttls-credentials
     '(("smtp-server" 25 nil nil)))
(setq starttls-use-gnutls t)
(setq starttls-gnutls-program "gnutls-cli")
(setq starttls-extra-arguments nil)

That’s it. Now I can apt-get remove postfix and have one service less in the background of my daily computing.


Author
portrait
Björn Schießle
Computer Scientist (Dipl. Inf.), graduated at University of Stuttgart, Germany.
Active in the Free Software movement for over 25 years.
Long-term volunteer at FSFE and member of the General Assembly.
Co-founder and PreSales-Lead of Nextcloud.


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