Introducing offlinemsmtp

I use a program called mutt for managing my email. A lot of the time, I want to download all of my messages and use mutt offline (for example, when I’m on the train commuting to work). In these cases, I also want to be able to queue email messages to send once I get back online. Even when I am online, sometimes the process of sending the message can take a while (with a large attachment, for example), and I don’t want mutt to freeze while the email is being sent.

For downloading messages for viewing offline, I use a program called mbsync which is part of the isync project. However, I could not find a program to replace msmtp (the program that is normally used to send email from within mutt). So, naturally I wrote my own program to handle this:

offlinemsmtp has two components:

1. A daemon which listens for changes to the configured outbox folder on the local filesystem. When a new message appears in the outbox folder, offlinemsmtp sends the email immediately if the server is available. At a configurable interval, offlinemsmtp attempts to send the emails that are still in the folder (due to not having been sent earlier).

2. An enqueuer for adding mail messages to the outbox folder.

Once you have configured both of these components, offlinemsmtp is a drop-in replacement for msmtp in mutt. So, if your sendmail configuration was:

set sendmail = "msmtp -a personal"

with offlinemsmtp it would become:

set sendmail = "offlinemsmtp -a personal"

You can find more information about offlinemsmtp and its configuration options at the project’s GitHub page.

offlinemsmtp version 0.3.5, is available via PyPi and the AUR.