My first mutt

mutt overview

Sat, 25 Aug 2001 14:39:58 +0000

From now on, this guide is going to assume that you have mutt installed locally, start by typing mutt in your console and hit enter. You may get a couple of warnings straight away; Don’t worry, let mutt create a ~/Mail folder in your home directory and don’t panic if there is no spoolfile for your username - This won’t be created until you actually receive some mail.

The index viewer

When you launch mutt, the first thing you see is a screen with a list of email messages. This initial menu is called the index.

Mail accounts

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Where does your mail actually live?

This guide was written when a Unix machine received its own mail: messages were delivered over SMTP to a local mailspool, and mutt simply read the file. That still works, and if it describes your setup you can skip this page.

For nearly everybody else, mail lives on somebody else’s IMAP server - Gmail, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, Proton, a university, a hosting company. So the first job is connecting mutt to that account. There are two ways to do it, and you can change your mind later:

Mail storage

Tue, 21 Aug 2001 23:00:11 +0000

System mailspool and home archives

By default, mutt looks for your inbox mailfolder in the system mailspool. This mailspool is usually an mbox file somewhere like /var/spool/mail/$USER (where $USER is your username). To find out where your mailspool is, type this command in your shell:

echo $MAIL

Your mailspool is just one folder and you should only use it for current mail. Keep old mail archives and filter mailing-lists to mailfolders somewhere in your home directory. By default mutt looks for these folders in the ~/Mail/ directory.

Collecting mail

Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:37:30 +0000

Mutt doesn’t want to collect your mail

In an ideal world, all your email arrives automatically at the machine that you use to read your mail - you just open up your mailspool and find it there. If this is the case for you, then you don’t need to read this page.

The rest of us are in the situation where the final destination of our email is some IMAP or POP3 mailserver hosted by somebody else. Mutt can talk to that server directly, and if your connection is fast and reliable that may be all you ever need - see the mail accounts section.

Text editing

Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:41:10 +0000

Mutt doesn’t edit text

When you reply-to or start a new email, mutt creates a temporary file, fills it with quoted-text and/or your signature, and opens it in an external text editor for you to compose your message. When you have finished, you save the message and mutt takes it from there.

It is up to you and your editor what the message contains. In particular mutt will not stop you from overquoting, bad-spelling or typing in lines that are just too long.

Sending mail

Sun, 12 Aug 2001 14:33:08 +0000

Mutt talks SMTP

Mutt has had its own SMTP client since version 1.5.15, so for most people sending mail is one line of configuration:

set smtp_url = "smtps://you@example.com@smtp.example.com/"

Mutt will connect to that server itself and hand over the message. Authentication works exactly as it does for IMAP, and is covered in the mail accounts section - if reading your mail works, sending it almost certainly will too.

Check your build has it by looking for +USE_SMTP in the output of:

Filtering mail

Sun, 12 Aug 2001 14:29:11 +0000

Mutt doesn’t filter mail

You wouldn’t want every single piece of incoming email dropped straight into your mailspool. There are things that you want to do with mail as it comes in: removing spam, sorting mailing lists into their respective folders and even altering the content - This is a job for a mail-filter.

Where that filtering happens depends on where your mail lives. If it arrives on a server you control, filter it there as it is delivered. If it sits in somebody else’s IMAP account, filter it there, on their server, before it ever reaches you. Persuading mutt to sort mail that has already arrived is hard and is not going to be very satisfactory.

Searching mail

Tue, 21 Aug 2001 22:57:44 +0000

Pattern matching with regular expressions

Mutt has powerful regular expression matching for searching, tagging mail and limiting the message view - but only within a single mailfolder.

If regular expressions are new to you or just plain scary, don’t panic: mutt will look at your search word and attempt a simple search for you. For example:

In the index view, hit the / key to search all the visible messages. Now, instead of entering a regular expression that you want to match, simply type the word you want to search for: joe , then hit enter. Mutt will translate this into the regular expression: ~f joe | ~s joe. The mutt cursor will jump to the next message with the word joe in the message’s headers From: or Subject:. You can repeat the search and find the next matching message by hitting n for search-next.

Cryptography

Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:39:42 +0000

Email transport is a fundamentally insecure system; messages can be easily intercepted, altered, forged and snooped without much evidence that this has happened. One way of preventing interception and eavesdropping is to encrypt the network connection.

That part is now solved and mutt does the right thing without being asked. Use imaps , pops and smtps rather than their unencrypted equivalents, as described in the mail accounts section; mutt’s ssl_force_tls setting, on by default, means it will refuse to talk to a remote server in the clear even if you get the URL wrong.

File attachments

Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:45:24 +0000

MIME

There is one standard technique for sending multimedia through email, it’s called MIME and mutt supports both sending and receiving it. MIME is an acronym for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions; you should read a MIME overview if you are interested in how it works and why it came to exist.

~/.mailcap

Mutt, like many other mime aware tools, refers to the mailcap configuration file for instructions on viewing different types of mime-encoded mail attachments.

Following links

Sat, 25 Aug 2001 14:08:45 +0000

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.

Managing addresses

Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:47:37 +0000

The alias file

Mutt has built-in support for managing email addresses with the alias command. To tell mutt about a new email address, you can enter the alias directly:

:alias mutt-users Mutt Users List <mutt-users@mutt.org>

Mutt will forget this alias when it restarts, so permanently add it to your .muttrc file or, better, keep them in a file of their own that mutt writes to and reads back:

set alias_file = ~/.mutt/aliases
source ~/.mutt/aliases

The mutt <create-alias> command, bound to a by default, creates a permanent alias entry based on the currently selected message and appends it to that file.

About this guide

Sat, 13 Oct 2001 11:58:09 +0000

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.