NAME¶

muttdown - Sendmail replacement that compiles markdown into HTML

SYNOPSIS¶

muttdown [-c config_file] [-p] -f from_address [-s] to_address ...
muttdown [-h]

DESCRIPTION¶

muttdown is a sendmail-replacement designed for use with the mutt email client which will transparently compile annotated text/plain mail into text/html using the Markdown standard.

It expects a RFC-822 formatted mail on STDIN.

It will recursively walk the MIME tree and compile any text/plain or text/markdown part which begins with the sigil "!m" into Markdown, which it will insert alongside the original in a multipart/alternative container.

It's also smart enough not to break multipart/signed.

For example, the following tree before parsing:

- multipart/mixed
|
-- multipart/signed
|
---- text/markdown
|
---- application/pgp-signature
|
-- image/png

Will get compiled into:

- multipart/mixed
|
-- multipart/alternative
|
---- text/html
|
---- multipart/signed
|
------ text/markdown
|
------ application/pgp-signature
|
-- image/png

OPTIONS¶

-c CONFIG_FILE, --config_file CONFIG_FILE

Path to YAML config file (default ~/.muttdown.yaml)

-p, --print-message

Print the translated message to stdout instead of sending it

-f from_address, --envelope-from from_address

The from address for the email

-s, --sendmail-passthru

Pass mail through to sendmail for delivery

to_address

The to address where the email is being sent

CONFIGURATION¶

Muttdown's configuration file is written using YAML. Example:

smtp_host: smtp.gmail.com
smtp_port: 587
smtp_ssl: false
smtp_username: foo@bar.com
smtp_password: foo
css_file: ~/.muttdown.css
assume_markdown: false

If you prefer not to put your password in plaintext in a configuration file, you can instead specify the smtp_password_command parameter to invoke a shell command to lookup your password. The command should output your password, followed by a newline, and no other text. On OS X, the following invocation will extract a generic "Password" entry with the application set to mutt and the title set to foo@bar.com:

smtp_password_command: security find-generic-password -w -s mutt -a foo@bar.com

NOTE: If smtp_ssl is set to False, muttdown will do a non-SSL session and then invoke STARTTLS. If smtp_ssl is set to True, muttdown will do an SSL session from the get-go. There is no option to send mail in plaintext.

The css_file should be regular CSS styling blocks; we use pynliner to inline all CSS rules for maximum client compatibility.

muttdown can also send its mail using the native sendmail if you have that set up (instead of doing SMTP itself). To do so, just leave the smtp options in the config file blank, set the sendmail option to the fully-qualified path to your sendmail binary, and run muttdown with the -s flag

If assume_markdown is true, then all input is assumed to be Markdown by default and the !m sigil does nothing.

AUTHORS¶

muttdown was written by James Brown <Roguelazer@gmail.com>.

This man page was adapted from muttdown's README by Stephen Gelman <ssgelm@gmail.com> for the Debian project and may be used by others.