This intentional blocking of outbound port 25 for email is usually aimed at preventing hijacked hosts from acting as spambots and sending email over the ISP's network. Such a situation could result in the ISP being flagged as a source of spam and added to spam-blocking websites, thus preventing legitimate email from reaching its proper destination.
To eliminate the issue of blocked outbound email, I wanted to use an email client that I could run as an email user on my own email server. In other words, I would use SSH login to access my email server anywhere, anytime. Once logged in, I would simply start the email client and receive and send email directly from my own email server, this eliminating any outbound port 25 blocking issues.
I have used many different open source email clients over the years, from recent options with graphical interfaces, like KMail and Thunderbird, to text-mode email clients such as mailx, Mutt, and Pine.
Of the latter three, I preferred Pine because it seemed to best fit my style of working. I also remembered that Pine, which I used about 15 years ago, supported what I was trying to do to overcome the blocked email problem, so I thought I would give it another try.
Unfortunately, Pine, which was written at the University of Washington in , is no longer supported and has not been updated since It has been replaced by Alpine , also written at UW, which was intended to be a complete rewrite and a replacement for Pine.
I decided to try Alpine version 2. Although Alpine can be used to remotely access an email server, I wanted to install it directly on the server and use it there. This means that the user must log into the mail server remotely using a valid login ID. This brings up an issue because email accounts are generally not login accounts. A typical email account uses the nologin shell to prevent the user from logging into the mail server. Here is what I got when I tried to log in with the nologin shell:.
To convert the student account to a login account, change the shell to any regular login shell. I like Bash, so, as you can see below, that is what I changed the user shell to. This change doesn't affect the use of the account for email.
Here is the user account after I changed the default shell to Bash:. When creating a new email account, the default shell for Linux is Bash, so no changes were needed. I tested my new email account by using it to log into the email server. I then configured the email server to add the student account. Other email servers may use different methods to add a new email user. I sent a test message to the student user to verify that the account could receive emails.
Alpine is easy to install on CentOS which is my preferred server distro, although I sometimes use Fedora as a server. This is an open source Email client for Borland Delphi with source code.
Emil Email Client is an html based email client for the zope server, which is similar to those provided by free webmail. MeMail is a no-nonsense, fast, and reliable email client who's main feature is that it is built in a modular fashion, and displays as such on the screen.
This allows full control over what is displayed and. Sending and receiving email anonymously through nymservers and remailers,such as nym. This enhanced feature will be benificial to Xoops site managers and staff.
This module is Powered by. This is a Java Email client for academic purpose. It will include the general email client features and other experimental techniques such as uncertain reasoning, HCI principles. This project is not supported now.
Python IMAP email client. Cross platform email client that works on both windows and linux. Such users spend most of their time on the Linux terminal or command line environment. In such circumstances, there is no need to keep switching from the Linux terminal to a GUI-powered web interface to check and respond to urgent emails. You only need to master how to install, configure, and use the terminal-based open-source Alpine email client.
Choose either of the following Alpine installation guides that are applicable to your Linux operating system distribution. To interact with either of the showcased Alpine main menu items, use the keyboard arrow keys for navigation and the [Enter] key for selection.
Since Alpine is an email client, it can be set up to interact with a targeted email server of your choice. For this tutorial demo, we chose to use a Gmail SMTP server since almost everyone has or uses a Gmail email account to send and receive mail.
The resulting interface is the one you will be using to edit the SMTP server settings related to the mail server you are using. I created a random Gmail email account for this demo. The main attraction is the ease of use offered by keeping my hands on the keyboard and reducing the number of times I need to reach for the mouse. It is also about scratching my sysadmin itch to do something different and use an excellent text mode interface in the process.
I already had Alpine set up from my previous use, so it was just a matter of starting to use it again. I previously set up Alpine on my mail server—I used secure shell SSH to log into the email server using my email account and then launched Alpine to access my email. I explained this in my previous article, but the bottom line is that I wanted to circumvent ISPs that block outbound port 25 for mail transfer in the name of spam reduction. A bit of bother, really. But now I want to run Alpine on my workstation or laptop.
It's relatively simple to configure Alpine on the same host as the email server. Using it on a remote computer requires a good bit more. Installing Alpine on Fedora is simple because it is available from the Fedora repository. Just use DNF as root:. This command installs Alpine and any prerequisite packages that are not already installed.
In my case, Alpine was the only package installed. To launch Alpine, open a terminal session, type alpine on the command line, and press Enter.
The first time you start Alpine, it displays a message that it is creating the user directory structure on the localhost. It then displays a Welcome message, and if you press Enter , you are treated to a copy of Apache's license. That is good, and you should probably read the license at some point so that you know its terms. But the most important thing right now is to configure Alpine to get your email.
For now, just press lowercase e to exit from the greeting message. You should now see Alpine's Main menu I deleted several blank lines of the output to save space :. You can change the defaults, but I recommend against it. When using IMAP, emails are not stored locally unless you copy them to local folders. The email administrator for your organization—that might be you—will add your account to the IMAP server and provide you with the initial password. This type of interface is also sometimes called captive user interface CUI , which does not provide a command-line interface that can be used in scripts, for example.
You must exit from the program to perform other tasks. By contrast, the mailx program is an email program that can be used with either a TUI, from the command line, or in scripts. For example, you can use the following command to send the results of the free command directly to the sysadmin's email account:. Notice in Figure 1 that all of the possible options in the Main menu in the center of the interface and the menu items along the bottom of the Alpine UI are shown as uppercase letters.
But you can use either uppercase or lowercase when issuing commands; Alpine recognizes and responds to both. Uppercase is easier to see and recognize in the interface, but it's easier to use lowercase to enter commands and make menu selections. I will use uppercase letters in bold throughout this article to indicate menu selections to mimic the Alpine UI.
On the Main menu, you can use the Up and Down arrow keys to highlight a different option and then press Enter to select it. The only way to access the menu items along the bottom of the Alpine screen which I call the secondary menu, for lack of a better term is by using the letter designated for each.
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