* On 15 Nov 2014, M. Fioretti wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> almost one year ago, I had a problem with mutt, so I asked for help
> here, describing it in detail, see (1) below. It received one answer
> (2), but:
>
> I don't know why, honestly, I NEVER saw it last year. I have no memory
> of it at least, sorry!
>
> Besides, for many reasons not relevant, the need to do what I had
> described in my message "vanished" a couple of days later and never
> came back until this week. So only today I have seen message (2)
> below, and immediately tried what Mick suggested. No luck. If I add
> port 587 I only get a different error message, and nothing more
> because that mutt was not compiled with debug support and I can't
> change it on that machine:
>
> DEBUG was not defined during compilation. Ignored.
> gnutls_handshake: An unexpected TLS packet was received.
>
> so, sorry again for not realizing for one year I had left this
> thread hanging and... any more suggestion on how to fix this, or
> at least understand exactly what is happening?
>
> Thanks,
> Marco
>
> (1) https://www.mail-archive.com/mutt-users@mutt.org/msg47293.html
>
> 2) https://www.mail-archive.com/mutt-users@mutt.org/msg47294.html
Generally your smtp_url should be one of:
smtp://server/ For unauthenticated SMTP on the standard port (25)
smtp://server:587/ For unauthenticated SMTP on the submission port (587)
smtp://user@server:587/For authenticated SMTP on the submission port
smtps://user@server/ For authenticated SMTP on the secure port (465)
STARTTLS is the SMTP command (it exists in other protocols too) to
negotiate a switch to secure communication over an initially insecure
line. Mutt will attempt STARTTLS to secure credentials when using
smtp:// URLs. Neither port 25 nor port 587 is required to support
STARTTLS, but 587 usually does and port 25 often does. Port 465 is used
for "smtps", which means there is no STARTTLS negotiation but a TLS
handshake is performed right off the bat at connection time.
Recently a user on this list discovered that his ISP uses port 80 for
outbound SMTP. That's quite nutty but it does occur.
"user" is tricky. At smaller providers with only one user namespace,
it's usually just an account name -- such as "dgc" for me. At providers
who serve more than one namespace (domain, virtual host) through the
same interface, it's more likely to be a fully qualified email address.
So your SMTP URL could look like this:
smtp://u...@example.com@smtp.example.com/
... which looks wrong, but is actually quite usable.
For debugging, don't set smtp_pass at first. This complicates
the diagnostic process. Just let mutt prompt you for a password
when needed. If it doesn't prompt, it's not even encountering
authentication; this is useful information.
If you're not in the mood for deeper debugging (connecting to canonical
SMTP ports with telnet or netcat or openssl s_client and issuing SMTP
commands manually) then try each of the four patterns above, in order,
and note whether and how they fail due to authentication requirements.
Only set smtp_pass after you have everything working otherwise.
As always, compiling mutt with DEBUG and gathering a .muttdebug0 file
will help greatly.
--
David Champion • d...@bikeshed.us
