Astroid setup

Astroid needs some information to start with. You can setup Astroid, provided you already have notmuch working (if not, see our introduction to notmuch).

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If you have not compiled and installed Astroid yet, refer to: Compiling and Installing.

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Configuration

Astroid uses the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/astroid directory (or $HOME/.config/astroid if it is not set) for storing its configuration file. This is a JSON file created by boost::property_tree. Options not set here will be set to their default values as specified in src/config.cc.

By default astroid looks in $HOME/.mail for the notmuch database, but you can change this in the configuration file. You can also set up default queries and accounts for sending e-mail there.

you can run:

$ astroid --new-config

to create a new configuration file in the default location, you can also specify a location of the new config file with the -c argument.

Where to find your mail database

astroid reads your notmuch configuration file to find the notmuch database, you can specify a non-standard notmuch configuration file with the astroid.notmuch_config setting.

What your email account is

Some self-explanatory variables that you probably want to configure are (where exampleaccount is an arbitrary identifier for your email account):

"accounts": {
  "exampleaccount": {
    "name": "Jane Doe",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "gpgkey": "0x000000000",
    "save_sent_to": "/home/jane/Mail/sent/cur/",
    "save_drafts_to": "/home/jane/Mail/drafts/",
    etc
  }
},

you can copy this and use an unique identifier (exampleaccount) to add several accounts. Use the example generated using astroid --new-config as the most up-to-date template.

Check the configuration reference for a full list of options with their documentation.

How to send email

At last, you need to define which program to call to send your email. For instance:

• if you use msmtp: "accounts.id.sendmail": "msmtp --read-envelope-from -i -t"
• if you use a sendmail compatible solution (e.g. postfix), the line should be: "sendmail": "sendmail -i -t"

For sendmail: the -i flag is very important.

Make sure that you configure your sendmail program to remove BCC headers.

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Next Step: Polling your email