how to configure mutt as email client in Linux for a remote microsoft exchange server?

Question

I have a Windows XP laptop that has MS Outlook 2007. I didn't have to do anything to set it up. I connected my laptop to office network and it picked up all settings by itself. Now I want to dump this laptop and start replying on my Linux (RHEL) desktop. I want to use mutt as the email client to my remote exchange mail server. I have got the mail server hostname and it does support IMAP. I don't want to use a GUI mail client in Linux. I see that Outlook uses an Exchange proxy to connect and it uses NTLM authentication. I have the username and password for the emails. I did extensive search on internet on this topic and I now come to understand that mutt won't do all client jobs like fetching mails, sending mails, etc, so I have to use

• sendmail as simple SMTP client, not as mail server.
• procmail
• fetchmail
• and of course configure mutt to use all the above services.

The most difficult part is configuring sendmail to send mails. Sendmail has far too many options, which is scary, and all documentation on this subject is very old, mostly before 2007.

Can somebody explain what are the steps involved in configuring mutt to receive and send emails on my Linux machine? These are the few things that I can't compromise on:

• it is a must that sendmail be used and not any other software because it is already there and it has lots of documentation so if in trouble there will be help
• it should be mutt and none other.
• password should not be available as a plain text in any text file. it should be encrypted if it needs to be stored in a file.
• it should not prompt me for password every now and then.
• Preferably the interval for checking for new mails should be 2 mins.
• All the filters in Exchange that I have already placed should be exported in mutt as well. It will be better if new filters I create in mutt be exported to Exchange. (This is OPTIONAL)
• email should be available both on the server as well as in mutt. This is a absolute must.

Answer 1

You won't need procmail or fetchmail. If you want a local copy of your mail, for offline access, use offlineimap. Otherwise, mutt can query the server live via IMAP.

I think you will find it nearly impossible to avoid storing the password unencrypted if you use mutt to connect.

With offlineimap, you can configure it to use gnome-keyring to store the password, which is stored encrypted. Instructions here: http://www.clasohm.com/blog/one-entry?entry_id=90957