Following links

URLs

People can include Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in email. URLs are internet links such as http://www.mutt.org/ or mailto:bruno@postle.net. You could just copy these with a mouse, then paste them into whatever program and visit them that way - this would be awkward at best.

Your terminal may already do it

Before installing anything, try clicking a link. Most terminal emulators now detect URLs in the text and make them clickable, usually with a modifier key held down, and many also support explicit OSC 8 hyperlinks. If yours does, that may be all you need.

urlscan

The classic answer was urlview, a small helper that extracted URLs from a message and offered them as a menu. Its upstream has been dead since around 2013 and it is disappearing from distributions, so use one of its replacements.

urlscan is the maintained one. It understands quoted-printable and base64 encoded messages, which urlview did not, and - more usefully - it shows the surrounding context for each link rather than a bare list. That matters, because a list of unadorned URLs is exactly the situation in which people click on the wrong thing.

Pipe the message to it with a macro in your ~/.muttrc file. A macro is a series of commands bound to a key:

macro pager \cb <pipe-message>'urlscan'<enter> 'Follow links with urlscan'

In the pager , hit Ctrl and b together to launch it.

extract_url is a Perl alternative that does the same job and is a closer drop-in replacement for urlview. Either is fine.

w3m

You can also just hand the whole message to a terminal web browser and let it do the link handling. The w3m browser keeps the message intact and lets you follow links from where they appear in the text:

macro pager \cb <pipe-message>'w3m -T text/plain'<enter> 'Follow links in w3m'

Once the message is visible, hit : to highlight all the urls.

Which browser opens

However you pick the URL, something has to open it. Mutt and its helpers use the BROWSER environment variable, and most tools fall back to xdg-open , which consults your desktop’s default. If you want links from mail to open somewhere particular, set it in your shell profile:

export BROWSER=firefox

A separate browser profile for mail is not a bad idea.

Last updated 31 August 2026.