Specifying a custom MTA path in caff
I recently had to sign someone’s GPG key. I’ve long used the caff
tool from the signing-party package to help me with
this. Unfortunately, I’m using a new laptop and hadn’t yet configured
caff on it. Moreover, caff uses the system MTA by default,
normally found at /usr/sbin/sendmail, and I hadn’t yet properly
configured it to send mail to the outside world. Since I have multiple
email accounts and use mutt as my mail client, I use msmtp as my
SMTP client / sendmail drop-in. This post describes how to configure
caff to use msmtp.
Reading the caff man page, one sees the following tantalising hint,
which leads you to believe it’s completely trivial to specify your own
MTA:
$CONFIG{'mailer-send'} = [ 'sendmail', '-f', $CONFIG{'email'}, '-it' ];
Unfortunately, substituting in a custom path, e.g.,
/home/rak/bin/msmtp/msmtp-default, for sendmail in the above line
results in a long sequence of errors when caff tries to mail the
signed keys:
Bareword "home" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 218) line 1.
Bareword "rak" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 218) line 1.
Bareword "bin" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 218) line 1.
Bareword "msmtp" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 218) line 1.
Bareword "msmtp" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 218) line 1.
Bareword "default" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at (eval 218) line 1.
Fortunately, it’s still straightforward to accomplish after reading the perldoc for
Mail::Mailer.
In my case, it was sufficient to add the following to my ~/.caffrc:
$ENV{'PERL_MAILERS'} = 'sendmail:'.$ENV{'HOME'}.'/bin/msmtp/msmtp-default';
$CONFIG{'mailer-send'} = [ 'sendmail' ];
To specify alternate paths to your sendmail-style MTA, simply modify
the value of $ENV{'PERL_MAILERS'} after the initial sendmail:
bit. If you’re using stock msmtp, I believe the following pair of
lines will work, though I haven’t tested it:
$ENV{'PERL_MAILERS'} = 'sendmail:/usr/bin/msmtp';
$CONFIG{'mailer-send'} = [ 'sendmail' ];
If there’s a more elegant way to accomplish this, I’d be happy to hear about it!
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To: Ryan Kavanagh <rak@rak.ac> Subject: [blog-comment] /blog/2016-04-16-specifying-a-custom-mta-path-in-caff/ post_id: /blog/2016-04-16-specifying-a-custom-mta-path-in-caff/ author: [How should you be identified? Usually your name or "Anonymous"] link: [optional link to your website] Your comments here. Markdown syntax accepted.2 Comments
Roger Shimizu
Roger Shimizu