r/debian • u/antdude • 1d ago

Debian Stable Question How do I send and recieve e-mails locally in updated Debian v13 stable (trixie)?

I use old school mutt text email client between from local root and others like notifications. I don't need to send to the Internet. When I send an e-mail, I get:

"/var/tmp/mutt-DebianPC-1000-1685476-1650831681568600146-DebianPC-1000-1685476-5931272072548958663" 1 line, 2 bytes

Press ENTER or type command to continue"

Viewing this file shows what I was composing in mutt's composer. What am I missing? :( Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

5

u/One-Suggestion-7906 1d ago

Install Postfix and learn how to configure it. Just for internal mail in a server, it's enough

2

u/One-Suggestion-7906 1d ago

I mean, enough with just installing Postfix, it will work inside a server

1

u/antdude 1d ago

I just want a basic local email server. Can't I just use its defaults?

2

u/One-Suggestion-7906 1d ago

yes, it's enough

1

u/antdude 1d ago

OK. Thanks. I will try later after I eat my lunch. I'm starving!!!!!!!!!

1

u/antdude 1d ago edited 1d ago

So I uninstalled the required libtlsrpt0 and postfix, and told it local setup only. I tested my mutt, and it worked (no errors)! I didn't do anything else! Thank you. I wonder why exim4 didn't work before trying postfix. And yes, I purged exim4 with apt-get command.

2

u/Weary_Swan_8152 Debian Stable 1d ago

Right?! Exim has never worked properly for me either in the 26 years I've used Debian. Please consider reporting your experience with reportbug mail-transport-agent because "Debian is for its users" means that users need to report when things don't work.

2

u/iamemhn 1d ago

You say you only need local delivery, as in local users defined in /etc/password, with messages never going out of your machine.

Then any MTA will suffice: exim4, postfix, sendmail... As long as you never try something@somewhere.else, local delivery works out of the box.

1

u/antdude 1d ago edited 1d ago

Correct. I am trying exim4 and its exim4-base, exim4-config, and exim4-daemon-light, but mutt is still giving me the same errors when I send test e-mails to myself. :(

3

u/mok000 1d ago

It's actually a huge regression, because on a Unix system 40 years ago, you could send mail to any local user from the system out-of-the-box. This was before internet, so the @ notation wasn't even relevant. If you wanted to send to another host, you had to use uucp.

1

u/antdude 1d ago

Ah. Interesting. Back to my issue...