I have email setup for my sites through webfaction. I have some number of mailboxes and some number of users, and a few users share the same mailboxes.

For a long time I used either a direct webmail or forwarded my site email to a different account, but I’m moving towards more email self-reliance.

A few minutes of searching didn’t tell me how to set up mutt on webfaction. Here is a minimal configuration for what I did.

I will assume that we are configuring email for user@mysite.com with mailbox MAILBOX, and where the password for that mailbox is MAILBOXPASSWORD. I will also assume that the user, mailbox, and password have already been set up. The missing step is to connect it to mutt.

My .muttrc looks like

set realname = "FIRST LAST"
set from = "user@mysite.com"
set use_from = yes
set edit_headers = yes

set imap_user = 'MAILBOX'
set imap_pass = 'MAILBOXPASSWORD'

set folder = "imaps://mail.webfaction.com:993"
set spoolfile = "+INBOX"
set record = "+sent"
set postponed = "+postponed"

set smtp_url = "smtp://MAILBOX@smtp.webfaction.com:587/"
set smtp_pass = "MAILBOXPASSWORD"

# optional caching and ensure security
set header_cache = "~/.mutt/cache/headers"
set message_cachedir = "~/.mutt/cache/bodies"
set certificate_file = "~/.mutt/certificates"

set ssl_starttls=yes
set ssl_force_tls=yes

It’s not particularly complicated, but it wasn’t obvious to me at first either.