Mutt

What is Mutt?

Mutt is a mailreader.

Some of the numerous features that make it indispensable to me:

• small and efficient
• extremely customizable
• threading, colors, filterred display of mailboxes
• ability to select mails matching patterns and regexps, and apply operations to them
• good mailing lists support
• curses based (hence easy use through a remote SSH connection)
• IMAP support
• handling of attachments, PGP/MIME with GnuPG
• automatic change of configuration based on recipients / folders

And of course, it's free software (licensed under the GNU GPL), condition without which the page of feature patches couldn't exist.

If you don't know Mutt yet, first go to the official homepage.

Links

Here are some pages worth visiting, but you should of course also check the links page of the Mutt's website.

•    MuttWiki: documentation, FAQ, patch list, etc.
•    Roland Rosenfeld: setup, compressed folders patch and LBDB (add-on to query email addresse from various means: ldap, abook, a database filled by procmail, etc...). List of mailers supporting PGP/MIME standard.
•    Muttrc builder: if you feel lost in front of the nearly infinite Mutt configuration possibilities, this might help you to get started.
•    Mutt / GnuPG guide by Justin R Miller.
•    Mutt  / HOWTO: yes, another one from the LDP.
•    Win32mutt: if for some reason you're forced to use MS OSes, this site certainly deserves a visit: Ulf Erikson has gathered there all you need to run Mutt with win32. You'll also find an adapted version of the edit_threads patch for Mutt 1.2.5. Also read this.
•    MuttFrenchPage: many tips for mutt and related software (vim, MTAs, PGP/GnuPG, fetchmail...). The meeting point for all French speaking users.

Setup

I used to provide a subset of my own Mutt setup here, but as time went by, it has evolved into something rather sophisticated which I think is no longer adapted as a starting point to new users.

Anyway, if you're using Mutt along with the vim editor, you might have a look at my ~/.vim/mail.vim file. Just put the following line to your ~/.vimrc:

autocmd BufRead /tmp/mutt* :source ~/.vim/mail.vim

Something like this should also help if you're fond of funky colors:

if has("syntax")
  syntax on
endif