2025-05-11

Spent the last couple of hours needlessly bashing my head against my keyboard trying to figure out how the hell to get around an issue that didn't actually exist. For some reason I had it in my head that SDF didn't have external IMAPS and SMTPS available, even to MetaARPA members. Maybe this was some age old limitation, maybe I read something somewhere that convinced me of this. Never the less, it seems I was mislead. You can, in fact, connect to IMAPS on port 993 and SMTPS on 587 to mx.sdf.org if you are a MetaARPA member.

For what it's worth, I did have success mounting my SDF Maildir using SSHFS to my laptop and Mutt did seem to behave just fine with this. The challenge ended up being sending. I tried all manner of hackery, a lot of which I'm not particularly proud of, involving ssh tunnels, netcat and msmtp over ssh and none of it worked. It always ended in authentication failures of one sort or another. Eventually I just gave up. That's when I noticed mention of port 587 on the IMAP and SMTP auth wiki page and slapped my forehead hard enough to wake the neighbors.

Tonight, I did not fail 99 times. I found 99 ways to overengineer a solution to a problem that didn't exist.