About this guide

This guide is aimed at people who are new to mutt. The existing documentation - the manual, various howtos, the FAQ - is excellent as reference material but assumes you already know how the underlying system works. New users often don’t, particularly if they are arriving from a graphical mailer, and what they need first is an overview of which pieces exist and which of them they actually have to care about.

It was originally written in 2001, inspired by the mutt-newbie project, which didn’t get very far. Most of the information here was extracted from hundreds of posts to the mutt-users list, which is still going and still a useful resource for anybody who uses mutt day-to-day.

Currency

The guide was substantially revised in 2026 for the mutt 2.x series. A good deal had changed in the intervening years: mutt gained its own SMTP client, header caching, a sidebar, compressed folder support, Autocrypt and OAuth2 authentication, all of which earlier versions of these pages described as missing or as third-party patches. A fair number of the helper programs recommended in 2001 have since been abandoned, forked or replaced, and those recommendations have been updated too.

The intention is that every page stays short. This is a guide to help you work out what you need, not a comprehensive listing, and it deliberately recommends one or two good options rather than surveying all of them. Where more detail exists elsewhere, there is a link to it.

Tools used creating this guide

The site is a set of Markdown files built into static HTML with Hugo. There is no database and nothing dynamic; the whole thing is a few dozen kilobytes of text. Earlier versions ran on MkDoc, a mod_perl document management system that has long since disappeared.

The pages are written to be readable in a terminal browser, which seems only polite given the subject.

Corrections

Corrections and suggestions are welcome, particularly reports of links that have rotted or advice that has quietly gone out of date - both of which this guide has a long history of. The address is at the foot of every page.

Copying

This guide is released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Last updated 31 August 2026.