Setting up multiple IMAP and SMTP accounts in Gnus

Emacs’ users tend to like to do everything in it as I do. A frequent desire is to be able to read emails in it. A popular option is Gnus.

Gnus is a beast it can do a lot of things from newsgroups, to RSS to emails. So configuring and using it can be a bit scary at first.

There’s a really widespread misinformation about Gnus. I thought for long it was true but it comes out it wasn’t.

This is about using multiple SMTP servers seamlessly for sending emails. I always read you have to use external tools such as MSMTP with specific configuration to make it acts as a proxy between your software and your multiple remote SMTP. Some other advice you to use a homemade function to play with message fields and hook it via message-send-hook.

Some will even tell you to hack your /etc/hosts.

But hey, Gnus is there since the nineties. Someone must have think of a solution and it must be built-in!

I stopped searching blog posts and Stack Overflow and read the manual entry which clearly states that you can set up a complex workflow using multiple SMTP servers.

This works by using posting styles which is a way to instruct Gnus of how you want to prepare your email (headers, body, signature) according to the context.

Before digging into it I’d like to explain my IMAP settings because it’s tightly related to how we’re going to setup SMTP.

So let’s take a look at the “select-method” definitions. This is where we tell Gnus about our IMAP servers, their local name and how they must behave:

(setq gnus-select-method '(nnnil nil))
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
      '((nnimap "home"
                (nnimap-address "imap.gmail.com")
                (nnimap-server-port "imaps")
                (nnimap-stream ssl)
                (nnir-search-engine imap)
                (nnmail-expiry-target "nnimap+home:[Gmail]/Trash")
                (nnmail-expiry-wait 'immediate))
        (nnimap "work"
                (nnimap-address "imap.gmail.com")
                (nnimap-server-port "imaps")
                (nnimap-stream ssl)
                (nnir-search-engine imap)
                (nnmail-expiry-target "nnimap+work:[Gmail]/Trash")
                (nnmail-expiry-wait 'immediate))))

We set gnus-select-method to nnnil which is a NOOP back-end. I prefer to set all the accounts in the same place gnus-secondary-select-methods.

In this variable I have declared two IMAP servers. The first one will be known locally as home and the second one as work.

Both are using Gmail, so we have to find a way to distinguish these to account to provide credentials.

The standard Unix way to share credentials across software is to store them in ~/.authinfo file. In my case I use ~/.authinfo.gpg so my credential are encrypted with GPG and no one but me can read it.

Here is the content of ~/.authinfo.gpg:

machine home login home@gmail.com password my_pasword port imaps
machine work login work@gmail.com password my_other_password port imaps

Now Gnus can read this file to get the credentials and log on the IMAP servers. Gnus know how to bind a given credential to a specific account because their share the same name home and work.

Ok from now on, we can get emails from Gnus through these two email accounts.

Now it’s time to configure these accounts to send emails using their respective SMTP server / credential.

Just for the sake of clarity, I do use the same IMAP / SMTP addresses for both accounts in my situation but this technique would work the same way with two accounts on two different email providers.

All the magic happens by taking advantage of Gnus posting styles:

;; Reply to mails with matching email address
(setq gnus-posting-styles
      '((".*" ; Matches all groups of messages
         (address "Nicolas Cavigneaux <home@gmail.com>"))
        ("work" ; Matches Gnus group called "work"
         (address "Nicolas Cavigneaux <work@gmail.com>")
         (organization "Corp")
         (signature-file "~/.signature-work")
         ("X-Message-SMTP-Method" "smtp smtp.gmail.com 587 work@gmail.com"))))

The first line with the .* is kind of catch-all rule which tells Gnus that no matter what is the group I’m in, my sender email address is going to be home@gmail.com.

For those who are not familiars with Gnus, a group is just an IMAP folder.

Then the second rule tells Gnus, if the current group matches anything with work in it then I want to handle my outgoing emails differently. My sender address is going to be work@gmail.com, my organization header is going to be Corp, my automatically inserted signature at the bottom of the email is going to be read from ~/.signature-work file and here happens the magic we use a special header that Gnus and message-mode understand called X-Message-SMTP-Method that was designed for this exact purpose, being able to specify an alternative SMTP server to use. So we specify that we want to use smtp protocol using the address smtp.gmail.com on port 587 and that the user account to use is work@gmail.com.

There’s one last thing to setup and you’ll be good to go. You need to provide your SMTP credentials. Once again it takes place in the ~/.authinfo file:

machine smtp.gmail.com login home@gmail.com password my_password port 587
machine smtp.gmail.com login work@gmail.com password my_other_password port 587

By searching the server name / username Gnus will be able to know the right credential to use.

It basically enables multi SMTP accounts in Gnus without bothering with any of these techniques.

Moral of the story, when it comes to Emacs you should always read the official doc first since most of the time you’ll find the info you need.