mutt / sending e-mail (was: adding OAuth)

[Ken Hornstein]

>	Quoth Mr Claus Aßmann: 'It's configurable. See the fine mutt
>documentation... So if mutt implements OAuth, it can use it directly.
>Maybe you should switch to that MUA?'
>	I've never used, just encountered when searching for how to
>use sendmail with OAuth.  Its site calls it a mail client.  I read
>mail with mailx; it sends mail using the SMTP server (usually
>sendmail, no?) - but I don't use mailx to send mail.  I expected the
>same of mutt: why go to the trouble of implementing one's own SMTP?

MUA authors implement a very simplified version of SMTP because you
aren't guaranteed to have a working sendmail installation locally, but
you are pretty much guaranteed to have a working SMTP server provided by
your ISP or email provider.  You don't need to do final delivery; you
just punt the email to your ISP or email provider and let them deal with
the hard stuff.  Also, I can say from a support perspective that telling
a user "here's where you set the SMTP server to use" is a lot easier
than "Ok, now you need to configure sendmail/postfix/whatever".

>	I compose messages with emacs, not a mail client; I use a
>script to send messages then archive them: I have a system.  I won't
>use an MUA that holds my messages captive to its system, such as all
>those webmail clients.  I'll have to look at mutt.

I would make a plug here for nmh; it was designed to be scriptable, and
also integrates with emacs via MH-E.  It also would ensure your outgoing
email is encoded properly according to the MIME standards; your reply to
Claus included his last name with a ISO8859-1 Eszett character (U+00DF),
but didn't have any MIME headers so recipients would have no idea what
character set you are supposed to use (messages with no MIME headers
are technically only supposed to be 7-bit).  And I have to confess I
am wondering how that happened since Claus used the digraph "ss" in his
last name in his email.

--Ken