My first mutt

This is a quick beginners guide for anybody adopting the mutt mailer. Links to more comprehensive online information, such as the mutt manual, are given wherever possible. This guide refers to the mutt 2.x series.

Mutt is a powerful, configurable and modern mail user agent for Unix-like systems such as GNU/Linux, BSD Unix, illumos or Apple macOS. On Windows, run it under the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Mutt is Free Software.

You should consider switching to mutt when you need to:

deal with large amounts of mail quickly and efficiently.
read mail anywhere via any machine that has a simple terminal interface.
fine-tune anything to do with email.

What is mutt?

Simply put, mutt is just a file browser specialised for browsing email. Mutt supports several standard methods for storing and accessing mail, such as mbox, mh, Maildir and IMAP.

Mutt has all the tools you could need for viewing, browsing, manipulating and assembling email. However, mutt may not do some of the things you might expect from a mail user agent (MUA); such as edit text or dispatch, collect and filter mail - Jobs that can be performed better and with more versatility by other complementary software.

So, mutt typically forms just part of a suite of mail-handling tools. This guide is to help you figure out which bits you need to assemble, the bits you already have and the bits you simply don’t need to bother with.

Mutt and NeoMutt

There are two mutts. Mutt is the original, still actively maintained and still releasing. NeoMutt is a fork that gathers up long-running community patches and adds features of its own, notably notmuch integration and NNTP newsreading.

NeoMutt tracks mutt’s changes, so nearly everything in this guide applies to both and your existing configuration will usually work unchanged. Start with whichever your system packages; both are widely available. Where something is specific to one of them, this guide says so.

mutt overview: mutt has no pull-down menus or buttons to point-and-click at. Navigating around the various parts of the program means learning a few keyboard shortcuts.
Mail accounts: Your mail is probably held by a provider like Gmail, Microsoft 365 or Fastmail. Connecting mutt to it means an IMAP URL, and a password that may not be a password.
Mail storage: Mail can be in all sorts of places, stored locally in various file formats or accessed remotely using network protocols such as IMAP.
Collecting mail: A lot of the time your incoming mail is somewhere else, like an IMAP server - You just need to bring it to a location where it can be sorted and dealt with.
Text editing: The job of writing mail is a task for you and your preferred text-editor.
Sending mail: Viewing your mail is fine, but you probably want to be able to send your messages to somebody else.
Filtering mail: Delivering incoming mail to different folders, deleting spam and general processing of incoming messages is a job for something other than mutt.
Searching mail: Mutt is great for finding your way among large amounts of mail in a folder, regular expressions are the basic tools.
Cryptography: Successful network protocols like email-transport are based on plain text. This makes it easy for other people to intercept, manipulate and forge messages.
File attachments: Mail is not just words, you probably need to send and receive different kinds of media such as images and documents.
Following links: Email can contain hyperlink URLs, there are various ways of following URLs and email addresses from mutt.
Managing addresses: Mutt has a simple and powerful method for storing and retrieving names and addresses, plus other address systems can be accessed.
About this guide: How this mutt guide came about, and how it is maintained