In my earlier post, I explained how to retrieve a password stored in a Mac OS X keychain from within Mutt. Mutt can be compiled with IMAP support, allowing for up-to-date access to your email account, but sometimes you want local copies of your IMAP folders for offline browsing or for backups. OfflineIMAP provides exactly this functionality: it synchronizes local maildir format email folders with a remote IMAP host. As with mutt, you normally can put your passwords in the configuration file, ~/.offlineimaprc, but that leaves your password in clear text in the file. Thankfully, OfflineIMAP allows you to run python code in some of its fields, and it lets you specify a file containing python code for it to source methods from.
posted at: Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:40 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | email, keychain, macosx, offlineimap
I am a fan of Mutt, a command line email client. It is really powerful, and it is highly customizable. Configuring it can be difficult due to having so many settings, but there are quite a few decent tutorials online for learning to configure it and any related commands.
Mutt used to have to rely on other programs in order to send and receive
mail on a remote server. But it has been possible for a while now to
use its own built-in support for POP and IMAP for receiving mail,
and SMTP for sending mail. Normally, if you did not want to have to
type in your password every time you connected, or if you use several
different accounts, you would have to store your password(s) in your
mutt configuration files in clear text. It would be nice if security
storing services like Mac OS X's Keychain, Gnome's Keyring, or KDE's
kWallet could be used natively within Mutt, but that is not yet the
case. Under Mac OS X, however, passwords can be stored in the Keychain
and accessed from the command line with the security command, and
Mutt configuration files can call snippets of shell code that will get
replaced with the output of the shell commands.
This article explains a basic approach on how to use the security command, and a basic way of using it in a Mutt configuration file. I may present the Ruby wrapper script that I actually use in a future article.
Click here to read more...posted at: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:31 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | email, keychain, macosx, mutt