One of my favorite open-sourced tools HAS to be mutt. In my opinion, it is the single greatest mail client that has ever existed. It’s small, super fast, and so configurable that it makes my head hurt. If you need something done, mutt can do it.

I’ve since moved all of my mail to my colo server. All my personal mail has already been delivered there for years, and recently I started POPs-ing my mail from work using fetchmail. I refuse to use MS Exchange’s webmail. It’s just awful to use no matter what anyone else says.

Anyway. The last thing I needed to make work was remote printing. There is a separate muttprint package that will take the generic text mutt output, pretty it up, and send it to a printer. The problem used to be that I don’t obviously have a printer connected to my colo server. Even if I did, it would be a pain to drive to the facility to retrieve documents. After a bit of Google work along with some ssh magic, I’ve come up with the solution:


set print_command="muttprint -p -| ssh me@my_work_desktop_hostname \"lpr -P techlaser\""

That’s right, the power of the | (pipe for you window’s n00bs). Encryped printing from my colo to my office laser printer. Nice.