How to fake sending -time when sending email with Mutt

dateemailmutt

Suppose a student is two hours late in returning an assignment. Now the assignment needs to travel a long way in internet so there is a good excuse that it got lost in somewhere or got jammed (well ok, fails but one always needs to find good reasons to return things a bit late in a funny way). Now is there some way you can make it look like the email was sent much earlier than it was actually sent?

Look I have strict timelines like 23.59, I am uncertain which clocks they use the measure that — sending or arrival time and in which time-zone. Could I change the time-zone so my email becomes "on time"?

Best Answer

If you set the edit_headers option to yes, you can edit all the headers of a mail before sending, and you can set your own Date header. A legitimate use for this is choosing your own timezone, or your own calendar.

Each server that your email passes through will add a Received header containing the date at which it received the mail (or the date at which it deigned to process it). You can't fake these unless you have control of the server. More precisely, from the recipient's point of view, the headers are reliable starting with the last machine on the path that the recipient trusts.

A common reason for email delays is greylisting. It can be hard to predict whether a specific email will be greylisted, because the decision is partly based on a server's recent history with each sender. However, not all servers do greylisting, and the greylisting could add to your lateness anyway.

Of course, email can be delayed because of malfunction, ordinary maintenance, or general network flakiness. Email was designed to be extremely reliable but not necessarily fast (when it was invented, a lot of sites had no permanent network connection; email might be downloaded and uploaded once a day in some places). Nowadays, email isn't as reliable as it used to be, but it's often near-instantaneous. A delay can happen, but it's unusual.

If you don't know when your assignment is due, ask your instructor.

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I had the same thing and this is what worked for me.

set ssl_starttls=yes
set ssl_force_tls=yes

set imap_user = "user@example.com"
set imap_pass = "!HASHEDPASSWORD!"
set folder = imap://mail.example.com/
set spoolfile = imap://mail.example.com/INBOX

# SMTP user auth
# # fill in the right user and pass based on your setup
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set smtp_url = "smtp://$imap_user@mail.example.com:587"
set smtp_pass = "$imap_pass"

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set record = '+Sent'

What made it NOT work for me was the order in which things were in the config file and a definition for 'set record' to a folder which was a link to a non existing folder.

When answering 'no' to the question of creating the Folder it was hanging and no traffic was seen towards the SMTP server.

PS: check sourced config files, they might specify conflicting settings and/or in the wrong order.

HTH

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AFAIK, Mutt itself cannot do such checks, but there's a workaround! The idea is to redefine the $sendmail variable to use a wrapper that will check the mail before sending it. For instance, in your .muttrc file:

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Best Answer

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Mutt not sending email when specifying smtp server

Avoid mutt sending mail with too many entries in To: or Cc: fields

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