Mutt

I use Mutt to read email. Mutt is a command-line email client. It's super fast and works anywhere I can get to a shell. It's like Vim for email. It took a little bit more effort at the beginning, but after a while I much prefered it to anything "modern". I started using Mutt because I got tired of slow email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird. I just wanted my email to pop open instantly. Even when I kept Thunderbird running in the background it would take more than a blink for the window to restore when I needed it.

Mutt is text-only so it can make modern mail seem a little tricky sometimes, but it handles MIME attachments and HTML quite well. Mutt can even read Word and PDF documents without much trouble. Below is documentation for my Mutt configuration. I configured it so that the key bindings are a little closer to Vim.

A very good page that documents a more advanced Mutt configuration can be found at Gary Johnson's Mutt Page.

Abook

For some reason I always forget that CTRL-T is used to access the Abook from the Mutt "To:" line.

Building Mutt

They added built-in SMTP support in version 1.5.15. I enable SMTP support so I can use a mail relay instead of relying on sendmail. Note that the Ubuntu 8.04 mutt package provides version 1.5.17, so building Mutt from source is not necessary.

apt-get install libncurses5-dev
./configure --enable-pop --enable-imap --enable-smtp --enable-hcache --with-ssl
make
make install

Mutt error

If you get an error like this then you forgot to use --enable-ssl in your configure step.

Error in /home/user/.mutt/muttrc, line 23: certificate_file: unknown variable

The configure help doesn't show this option, but certificates wouldn't work without it for me.

Basic .muttrc or ~/.mutt/muttrc

This is a .muttrc. This is nothing fancy. This seems to be the minimum to get Mutt working with IMAP. For more documentation go to Mutt documentation.

set mbox_type=maildir
set editor="vim"
# I like to see all my mail headers in my editor:
set edit_headers=yes
# don't wait for sendmail to finish (this runs sendmail in the background)
set sendmail_wait=-1
# this prevents Mutt from endlessly asking when you quit:
#     "Move read messages to ~/mbox? ([no]/yes):"
set move=no
# this prevents Mutt from endlessly asking:
#     "~/Mail does not exist. Create it? ([yes]/no):"
set folder=""
# if you use virtual mail hosts then Maildir might not
# be in the default location... try looking in:
# /home/vpopmail/domains/example.com/$USER/Maildir/
set spoolfile=~/Maildir/

# IMAP
# For IMAP connections use the following settings.
# Some settings replace those used above for folder and spoolfile.
# Note that the full mail username is "username@example.com" and
# the server name is "localhost". If you wanted to connect to a
# remote server the full URL might be something like:
#     imap://username@example.com@example.com
set folder="imaps://username@example.com@localhost"
set spoolfile="imaps://username@example.com@localhost/INBOX"
set imap_pass="my_stupid_password"
set certificate_file=".mutt_known_hosts"

~/.mailcap file

This helps Mutt to read a few other non-text MIME types common in file attachments.

<include src="http://www.noah.org/engineering/dotfiles/.mailcap" />

My real muttrc file

For my daily use I use a slightly more complicated muttrc file that tweaks usability to make it more Vim-like. Mutt key bindings are already pretty close to Vim, but there are a few other bindings that make Mutt feel even more like home. See the dotfiles page for more info about dotfiles. The following should be put in ~/.mutt/muttrc with 600 for permissions.

<include src="http://www.noah.org/engineering/dotfiles/.mutt/muttrc" />

mairix

This is an interesting Linux email indexer. What I really want is a big email database. Maybe I should just dump all my email into MySQL. http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/index.html