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I am new to handling things in a low level fashion and I am horrified at the lack of documentation for newbies who have had zero experience setting up MTAs, MDAs, etc. I simply need to connect to my Gmail account using SMTP and IMAP to send and receive email. I tried reading about sendmail, fetchmail, etc, but I still on level zero of setting up a usable system. How do I achieve this? I don't want my to setup GUI based applications like Thunderbird.

Vishal Subramanyam
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  • I find exim to be the easiest to use MTA and it comes with very good documentation. – D. SM May 15 '20 at 03:44
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    Keep Calm and Install `mutt`. It may not be the best solution for you, but it's a start. Then for bonus points, learn the standard parameters that any IMAP or POP client has to have. And finally, apply that learned knowledge, then come back and ask a more educated question than "How do I achieve this?" You achieve it by educating yourself, defining your goals in terms other people can understand, and taking steps that may educate you even if they don't bring you to your ultimate, favorite solution. Be open to learning along the way. – Jim L. May 15 '20 at 05:58
  • @JimL. I apologize for my frustration but I have spent over three days just on email. It's like a rabbit hole that never seems to end. I am not able to ask more specific questions than this one because I can't find the prerequisite knowledge. I installed mutt but the documentation assumed that I knew stuff, and every linked doc required a greater knowledge of the inner workings. – Vishal Subramanyam May 15 '20 at 12:56
  • It is unclear if you wish to just install an email client to use an existing email account, or to set up a complete email server of your own, or something in-between. Please describe your goal in more detail. – telcoM May 19 '20 at 08:55

2 Answers2

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MTA is a Mail Transfer Agent. Exim, Postfix and Sendmail are examples of that. If you want to use GMail then you do not need your own MTA. The MTA is a server which "speaks" SMTP and handles delivery.

In your case you just need a client (Mail User Agent (MUA) which is able to receive mail using the IMAP4 protocol and send using the SMTP protocol. Google is then hosting the mail with their mailbox server which you connect to with IMAP4 and using their server to send using SMTP.

I recommend that you do not attempt to setup a MTA until you are very comfortable working with any kind of MUA.

You will need to find a MUA (Mail User Agent) which you like. There are many to choose from which you can use in your terminal. The built-in client in FreeBSD is called mail and you can get mail to it using fetchmail. It is described in the Handbook. These are very old programs and mainly there for historic and compatability reasons. As a beginner I would recommend using them and look at a better MUA/client instead.

You can look through the mail packages to find one you like.

A commenter (@Jim L.) suggested mutt which is a fine and popular choice. It might have a little steep learning curve but it is nice and powerful when you know it.

My personal choice and more beginner friendly is Alpine which is often just called "Pine".

On FreeBSD it is as simple as:

pkg install alpine

Then you just setup IMAP. There are many tutorials available. You could have a look at How can I configure alpine to read my gmail in Ubuntu?. When Alpine is installed it works the same as on Ubuntu.

The same goes for mutt: How to install/setup mutt with Gmail on CentOS and Ubuntu?

Claus Andersen
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Mail is already set up for you on FreeBSD by default using sendmail. As always, such documentation can be found in The FreeBSD Handbook

My company and my personal email are all done using sendmail which only needs to be enabled.

Of course, there is more involved than just that if you want to have your mail not wind up in a spam folder everywhere but how to do that can be found all over the internet and StackExchange sites. It will take some time and study but, following the Handbook will get you up and running with a working system in a few minutes.

As I think you know, there are other MTAs available which are probably better choices today when starting anew.

Rob
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