Nowadays, most people would think that email is something simple, you just setup your preferred client (that’s called a MUA) with some information such as the smtp host you want it to talk to (that’s call a MTA and this one is your relayhost). Then there’s all the receiving mails part, and that’s smtp again on the server side. Then there’s how to get those mail, read them, flag them, manage them, and that’s better served by IMAP. Let’s talk about sending mails in smtp for this entry.

The traditional way to handle mail sending is to have your own MTA on each system you use — there used to be a sysadmin team caring about all those systems, but we’re lost in the personal computer era now — that only means you are the sysadmin. So about any Unix tool that wants to send a mail will do so with the command /usr/bin/sendmail to queue the outgoing message.

My typical workstation setup includes a full-blown MTA (my choice is Postfix) that will choose the next relay host depending on the message From field: I don’t want to trust any local default relayhost. Note that the next relay is connected to with authentication and over an encrypted protocol.

We’re getting there, really. But I don’t know a better way to present a software, little as it be, other than talking about the need that leads to its development.

Some relaying I do atop an ssh tunnel, and it happens that I send mail and have forgotten about setting up the aforementioned tunnel. In this case, the advantage is that it will not block my MUA ( gnus, in quite good shape those days, receiving lots of love), as the queueing happens as usual. The drawback is that Postfix will silently queue the mail until it’s able to deliver it, which can take days.

Enters M-x mailq! Ok, I could be doing M-! mailq and see Mail queue is empty in the message area, but then as soon as the queue’s not empty I need to resort to some shell or terminal in order to flush the queue — that’s after setting up the tunnel, as easy as C-= remote in my case, see cssh. Scratching that itch, I now only have to hit f here, to flush the queue. And from the gnus *Group* and *Summary* buffers, it’s M-q to see the mail queue.

Thanks to http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=218883 here’s a visual sample of the mailq mode, where you see the mail queue in colors and the keymap you’re offered.

So you could even flush only a given queue id or a given site, or just kill the current id or the current site so that it’s a C-y away. I hope it’s useful for you too — oh, and it’s already in the el-get recipes, of course!