Mutt: the least-bad mail client

To use Mutt to read your mail, say

mutt

You then get a menu of commands, including "?" for "help," which gives you a list of many more commands. The commands are mostly pretty clear, except it may not be obvious that "g" for "group" means "reply to the group". This is really all you need to know. The rest of this is for those who want to do more than the minimum, or who want to know why it is worth doing.

Mutt has several nice features out of the box. It automatically folds long lines. It automatically makes quoted printable (the stuff with equal signs at the end of each line) readable. You can use it to edit messages with "e" after you have saved them or before you send them. I use this feature to write comments on student papers sent (as text) by email. You can also selectively delete attachments or parts (e.g., the redundant html parts of messages) with "v" (view attachments) and "d" (delete). You can also read attachments directly, and save some of them (doc files) in a much more compact format (text).

One thing not well documented is how to forward a message with attachments. One way is to bounce it (b). Another way is to go into the view menu (v), which allows you to view the list of attachments. The first one is the message itself. Then tag (t) all the parts you want to forward. While still in the menu, type ;f. The semicolon applies the forward command (f) to everything that is tagged.

Although Mutt is great as is, it is even better if you let your geek nature come out a bit, learn all the stuff it can do, and try to configure it. It is, to put it mildly, highly configurable. Here is a basic introduction to Mutt from Norman Matloff (which, again, you do not need to read in order to get started, since the basic commands are listed on the screen):

The full mutt manual is at http://www.mutt.org. But here are some other useful tidbits, or biscuits, as the case may be. (Mutt doesn't have bugs. It has fleas.) (See My First Mutt for another introduction that can also serve as a reference.)

You can also use Mutt to decode attachments of various sorts. For example, suppose you want to configure Mutt to read "html" files with Lynx (a browser that displays text only in a terminal window), "doc" files with "antiword" (a program on Mail.sas, which extracts the text), and "pdf" files with ps2ascii (which extracts the text, losing the formatting and images). The advantage of doing these things is that they are very fast and can be done in a terminal window.

A .mailcap file: To do these things write a .mailcap file (with the .). For example, using an editor like Pico or Emacs, write someting called .mailcap. The lines beginning with # are comments:

Instead of
text/plain; fold -s %s; copiousoutput
you could try
text/plain; demoroniser.pl %s; copiousoutput
and copy (on mail.sas)
~baron/.bin/demoroniser.pl
to your own .bin directory. (If it doesn't exist, make it and add it to your path.) This translates Microsoft characters that arise from someone cutting and pasting from (e.g.) Word into a text email message.

A .muttrc file: The other thing you might want is a .muttrc file, which specifies your personal configuration. Here is one, with comments added with #, and with more lines than you might want:

The last line is my list of aliases, which you can see with:

more ~baron/.mutt.aliases

I like to separate the .muttrc file from the .mutt.aliases file because the latter is the same on all my computers, and the former is somewhat different.

The two lines about set hostname and set use_domain work together. When you send a message to somebody, without saying somebody@somewhere, the message goes to somebody@psych. This is useful for Psychology faculty, all of whom have a working email address of lastname@psych. For example, Dianne Chambless is dchamb, but also chambless@psych. If you have these two lines in your .muttrc file, you can use just chambless.

Name completion (from Warren Petrosky):

A very useful command in Mutt is esc-C (alt or escape key with upper-case C). This is "decode copy". Decode-save, esc-s (lower case) is similar. If you have set Mutt to decode Word files with antiword, and/or html files with Lynx, and/or long lines with fold, you can save the decoded versions rather than the (quota killer) originals.

You might want to add application/octet-stream everywhere you have application/msword because this is how many people encode word documents (and add it to .mailcap too). However, octet-stream is used for other things too, so this depends on who sends you mail.

The Mutt web page has other examples of .muttrc files.

Under the Options Menu, select Session Options.  Select
Emulation.  In the Terminal drop down menu, select ANSI, and
check the ANSI Color checkbox.  Thenk click ok.  Then, in your
terminal session (assuming that your session was already
started), at your command prompt type:

for bash shell:
$ TERM=ansi;export TERM

for csh/tcsh:
% setenv TERM ansi

Then at the command prompt, type:
reset

then reactivate Mutt and you should have color, if you've used the
color.muttrc file and have:
source "~/color.muttrc"
in your .muttrc file.

Converting from Elm

1. Elm is buggy, and hasn't been developed or maintained in several years.
2. mutt is very similar to elm, is actively being developed maintained, and has several additional features:
   • thread capable
   • handles attachments better
   • handles pgp encrypted messages
3. elm users will need very few adjustments to using mutt

Converting aliases

One adjustment is converting your alises. To do this, first say cd .elm and then say (or cut and paste) one of the following:

Note 1: This has been tested and it works even with group aliases, but it may fail with some unusual configuration. Please ask Jon Baron for help if it doesn't work.

Note 2: Instead of using .muttrc, you might want to use .mutt.aliases, as explained above in the section on .muttrc.

Commands