Configuring Mutt for Gandi Mail (IMAP and SMTP)
Gandi is my favorite registrar for many reasons. Their motto is “No Bullshit” and they mean it. They make it super easy to manage domains, and offer tons of great services. One of the best things about buying a domain from Gandi is that they provide you with free email for the life of your domain. Setting up a mail server can be a pain in the ass, so this is really kind of awesome. mutt is an awesome MUA (Mail User Agent) that is light weight, terminal based, and highly customizable. Your local mail system can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. There are countless guides out there on how to mutt, but a lot of them seem way to complex for my use case and can get very confusing. This guide will help you get mutt working with Gandi mail. Gandi mail is a pretty generic mail stack so this should also apply to any other IMAP/SMTP mail system that uses Dovecot, Postfix, etc… as well. My use case is this:
- I use Gandi mail for all of my personal email for a single address.
- I want to connect to Gandi using IMAP with mutt
- I want to send mail with mutt by connecting to Gandi with SMTP
- If you have not already, install mutt.
#On Debian Based Distros apt-get install mutt
#On Red Hat Based Distros
yum install mutt#On Mac OS X, assuming you have Homebrew Installed brew install mutt
- Open up a text editor and put the following in your \~/.muttrc file
# Configure imap username and password set imap_user="[email protected]" set imap_pass="YourPassword"
Configure Default Folder and where to put Sent Mail set folder=“imaps://mail.gandi.net:993/”
set spoolfile=$folder set record="=Sent"
Configure SMTP Settings
set smtp_url = “smtp://$imap_user:$imap_[email protected]:587/” set realname=“Your Name” set from=“[email protected]” set use_from = yes
Enable STARTTLS for Security set ssl_starttls=yes
- Fire up
mutt, you will be logged into your Gandi inbox and you can start rocking out your mail.
UPDATE 1:
Added STARTTLS to .muttrc example, thanks to Kenn for the catch.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- Using cgit
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- Making cgit Pretty
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7
Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it's always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they p...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 18, 2026You Can Message Me From My Website Now
I came across a rather interesting idea (via Intial Charge): I added a widget to every page here that lets anyone in the world immediately send me a notification. Type a message, hit send, and it’ll...
via Chris Hannah April 18, 2026Rhea Finance exploited for $18.4 million, some recovered
Rhea Finance's lending product was exploited for around $18.4 million after an attacker took advantage of a bug in the platform's slippage protection feature. The stolen assets affected both platform and user funds.Some of the stolen tokens were returned b...
via Web3 is Going Just Great April 18, 2026Generated by openring