stupidweasel – a stupid hack to weasel your mails out into the real world

This is a stupid sendmail emulator that allows Evolution to be used as some kind of a manual mail transport on a system with no functional sendmail. Evolution must be correctly configured. Mails received by this script will be put into Evolution’s local Outbox.

How to use it

Installing it

Running make install will install stupidweasel in $HOME/bin. It is also okay to install it as a shared binary (in /usr/local/bin, maybe); the script does not rely on where it is installed since Evolution configuration files are always in predictable locations in your home directory. You don’t need to keep the name stupidweasel, but the name you choose should not end in q or rm.

After installation, it is convenient to create a symbolic link that ends in q and another that ends in rm. For example, if you are used to Zmailer you might want the aliases mailq and mailrm:

make install
cd ~/bin
ln -s stupidweasel mailq
ln -s stupidweasel mailrm

It’s not necessary to create these symbolic links, but having them will make things more convenient. In the above example, running mailq would be the same as running stupidweasel --list; running mailrm would be the same as running stupidweasel --delete.

Configuring your text client

Before you can send mail through your favourite text client, you will need to configure it so it knows where to find your “sendmail”. In mutt, assuming your home directory is /home/alice, you would put the following in your .muttrc:

set sendmail=/home/alice/bin/stupidweasel

sendmail’s -N option is recognized but silently ignored; we have no control over the actual SMTP handshake so no influence over delivery status notifications.

Sending mails from a text client

If you have installed and configured everything correctly, you should be able to use your text client normally; the only difference is that to actually send any mail, you must manually press the Send/Receive button in Evolution.

If you want to include a signature but you have multiple Evolutuion identities with multiple signatures, you can create a .signature file with only this directive:

(*$insert_signature_here*)

The script will replace this directive with the correct Evolution signature. Make sure your plain-text signatures do not have the execute bit set; the script assumes that any file with the execute bit set is a signature script.

Listing the contents of the Outbox

If you want to see what is in Evolution’s Outbox, you can use the command

stupidweasel --list

Or, if you have created symlinks, you can use your “q” symlink. In the example, you could save keystrokes by typing

mailq

Evolution’s Outbox also contains mails that have been queued using Evolution’s own offline mode. The listing you get will make it clear which mails have been put into the Outbox by Evolution itself.

You can show a more detailed version of the listing by including the -v (or --verbose) option. In the example installation, that would be

mailq -v

Deleting mails from the Outbox

If you want to delete a piece of mail from the Outbox, you can use the command

stupidweasel --delete ID_NUMBER_OF_MAIL_TO_DELETE

Or, if you have created symlinks, you can use your “q” symlink. In the example, you could save keystrokes by typing

mailrm ID_NUMBER_OF_MAIL_TO_DELETE

You need to know the ID number of what you want to delete. To get this number you use the stupidweasel --list command (or, in the example, mailq).

You can make the script give you confirmation after deleting mail by including the -v (or --verbose) option. In the example installation, that could be something like

mailrm -v 1595494621.549.somehost

How it works

The script tries its best to detect the correct Evolution account that corresponds to the address used. This detected identity is placed in a synthesized X-Evolution-Identity header and injected in Evolution’s local Outbox using standard Maildir procedures. (If a suitable identity cannot be detected the script will exit with an error.)

The injected mail will be visible in Evolution as an unsent mail and can be sent by pressing the Send/Receive button (sometimes twice).

Note about the X-Evolution-Identity header

Although in theory Evolution knows which server goes with which address, in practice this knowledge is predetermined when you write your mail; this knowledge is then saved in an X-Evolution-Identity header, before the mail is saved in Evolution’s Outbox. Since we’re forgoing the GUI completely (except for sending), this header will be missing. This means if we don’t generate this header Evolution will actually have no knowledge of which account to use. In this case it will just pick a random account, most likely a wrong one.

Bugs

Mutt generates a User-Agent header if configured to do so. Evolution, on the other hand, generates an X-Mailer header (you have to wonder why!), even if an existing User-Agent or X-Mailer header is present. (If the mail originally had an X-Mailer header, Evolution will nuke it.) There is nothing we can do to prevent Evolution from doing this.

Queue-listing mode assumes each mail goes to only one recipient. This is of course wrong.

Delete mode will actually delete the maildir file from the Evolution Outbox. The correct way to do it would be to rename the file to include a T (trashed) flag, but Evolution seems to have some memory of what the name ought to be so renaming the mail doesn’t actually seem to work any better than just deleting it.

If the (*$insert_signature_here*) is used but no signature is defined (in Evolution) for the email address used, the script will exit with an error.

Notes

Proton Mail will delete both the User-Agent and the X-Mailer headers. There is nothing we can do to prevent Proton from doing this.