offlinemsmtp

Allows you to use msmtp offline by queuing email until you have an internet connection.

Features

• Runs as a daemon and (at a configurable time interval) attempts to send the mail in the queue directory.
• Drop-in replacement for msmtp in your mutt config.
• Only attempts to send the queued email message if it can connect to the configured SMTP server.
• When a new email message comes into the queue and you are already online, offlinemsmtp will send it immediately.
• Integrates with system notifications so that you are notified when mail is being sent.
• Disable/enable sending of mail by the presence/absence of a file. This is useful if you want to have some sort of "offline mode".

Installation

Using PyPi:

pip install --user offlinemsmtp

On Arch Linux, you can install the offlinemsmtp package from the AUR. For example, if you use yay:

yay -S offlinemsmtp

Run the daemon using systemd

Create a file called ~/.config/systemd/user/offlinemsmtp.service with the following content (if you installed via the AUR package, a service file was already created for you in /usr/lib/systemd/user so you only need to do this step if you want to customize the parameters passed to the daemon):

[Unit]
Description=offlinemsmtp

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/offlinemsmtp --daemon

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Then, enable and start offlinemsmtp using systemd:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now offlinemsmtp

Usage

offlinemsmtp has two components: a daemon for listening to the outbox folder and sending the mail when the network is available and a enqueuer for adding mail to the send queue.

To run the daemon in the current command line (this is useful for testing), run this command::

offlinemsmtp --daemon

To enqueue emails, use the offlinemsmtp executable without --daemon. All parameters (with a few caveats described below in Command Line Arguments) are forwarded on to msmtp. Anything passed in via standard in will be forwarded over standard in to msmtp when the mail is sent.

Configuration with Mutt

To use offlinemsmtp with mutt, just replace msmtp in your mutt configuration file with offlinemsmtp. Here is an example:

set sendmail = "offlinemsmtp -a personal"

Command Line Arguments

offlinemsmtp accepts a number of command line arguments:

• -h, --help - shows a help message and exits.
• -o DIR, --outbox-directory DIR - set the directory to use as the outbox. Defaults to ~/.offlinemsmtp-outbox.
• -d, --daemon - run the offlinemsmtp daemon.
• -s, --silent - set to disable all logging and notifications.
• -i INTERVAL, --interval INTERVAL - set the interval (in seconds) at which to attempt to flush the send queue. Defaults to 60.
• -C FILE, --file FILE - the msmtp configuration file to use.
• --send-mail-file FILE - only send mail if this file exists (defaults to None meaning that no file is required for mail sending to be enabled)
• All remaining arguments are passed to msmtp. The -C argument is automatically passed to msmtp.
• Anything after a special -- argument will be passed to msmtp. This allows you to pass arguments that may conflict with offlinemsmtp arguments to msmtp.

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING.md document for details on how to contribute to the project.

Other projects

• https://github.com/marlam/msmtp-mirror/tree/master/scripts/msmtpqueue - this is included with msmtp, but doesn't have all of the features that I want.
• https://github.com/dcbaker/py-mailqueued - looks cool, I didn't see it when I was researching, but it's probably better than my implementation, even thought I had a lot of fun doing mine.
• https://github.com/venkytv/msmtp-offline - it's written in Ruby.