First, to give credit where it’s due, I started here. That said, here’s how I store and access account passwords in mutt on Linux.
## -- Passwords: encrypted by gpg --------------------------------------------------------------
source “/bin/gpg -d ~/.keychain/mutt.password.neopost.gpg 2>/dev/null |”
The source line in gpg tells mutt to decrypt a file at startup. The file .keychain/mutt… contains two mutt configuration lines:
set imap_pass = "<my_email_password>"
set smtp_pass = "<my_email_password>"
I created it as follows:
$ cat <<EOF | gpg -r <my_gpg_id> ~/.keychain/mutt.password.neopost.gpg
set imap_pass = "<my_email_password>"
set smtp_pass = "<my_email_password>"
EOF
$
Gpg knows how to decrypt this file and retrieve the plain text configuration. Note well that I used a “Here” document to create the file. This keeps mail password out of the filesystem. Simple stuff, at mutt startup the first time I use it, gpg-agent asks for my gpg key and unlocks the configuration snippet.
Today, about the only place you should see an ascii TAB in a file is in a Makefile. In a world where memory is metered as gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage on fast SSDs there is absolutely no need to save space in a source code or configuration file by using a tab rather than two or four or eight spaces. Note well that I may be talking to your editor configuration and not you. But when you write code you should say what you mean and mean what you say unequivocally. I say this because I have been looking at a whitespace difference in my puppet checks for better than a month now. This is because my file has in production has tabs and my file in the puppet/git repository has spaces.
To that end, I’m linking this bit of Emacs magic for readers and my future self.
Brush aside vandals attacking my submission daemon with a little sed:
submission_brutes=$(bzcat /var/log/maillog.0.bz2 | \
cat - /var/log/maillog | \
sed -Ene '/postfix\/submission\/smtpd.*errors after AUTH/s/^.*[^0-9]+(([0-9]+\.){3}[0-9]*).*$/\1/p' | sort -u)
[[ ! -z "${submission_brutes}" ]] && pfctl -t blackhole -T add ${submission_brutes}
I ran across this today and I’m impressed with Phillip’s writing.
http://www.pgbovine.net/command-line-bullshittery.htm
Yet another open source journal