GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 729847
Can't configure Geary to use system's sendmail
Last modified: 2018-04-11 08:16:04 UTC
I would like to deliver my mail via a local sendmail(-alike) program. I can't, because Geary doesn't support that. I think it should.
Is there a particular reason you want Geary to use sendmail?
Just that I already have sendmail (actually msmtp) set up on my system, so now I have two places where my upstream email server is configured, and I'd rather have just one. msmtp doesn't support running a local SMTP server, so I can't simply point geary at 127.0.0.1:25. Maybe I should just switch sendmails to one where I can.
That would be the easiest thing, as Geary can do that today. I'll leave this open as I see that Evolution does have sendmail support. It appears Thunderbird doesn't (all the messages I've seen tell users to use a sendmail that accept connections from localhost).
I think it would be also great Geary to be able to check system mailbox. This way you can receive system notification mails.
There seem to be at least two use-cases here: 1. send mail via local sendmail 2. check local sendmail mailbox It seems both of these can be resolved by installing, configuring and running a local SMTP server, but this seems like overkill. Specifically, if the user is not planning on sending mail, just checking system messages, the ability to enter a username and check the /var/mail folder for that user would be welcome.
Adding support for local sendmail won't allow Geary to check local mailboxes, unfortunately - sendmail is a mail submission and/or transfer agent, not a mailbox access agent. If you'd like to do that you're probably better off installing a lightweight IMAP server that can read local mailboxes like uw-imap and e.g. running it on-demand from inetd/systemd. Since sending email via a local sendmail installation by invoking the sendmail binary directly is a very, very niche feature that would require some substantial rework of both Geary's UI and internals, I'm going to mark this wontfix. As above, if you would like to be able to do this, you are better off configuring your system to run sendmail locally as a daemon that listens on localhost for the submisison port (587), or have it launched on demand by inetd or systemd when a connection is attempted.