The Mutt E-Mail Client

Michael Elkins

version 1.5.11cvs

Abstract

``All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.'' -me, circa 1995


Table of Contents

1. Introduction
1.1. Mutt Home Page
1.2. Mailing Lists
1.3. Software Distribution Sites
1.4. IRC
1.5. USENET
1.6. Copyright
2. Getting Started
2.1. Moving Around in Menus
2.2. Editing Input Fields
2.3. Reading Mail - The Index and Pager
2.4. Sending Mail
2.5. Forwarding and Bouncing Mail
2.6. Postponing Mail
3. Configuration
3.1. Syntax of Initialization Files
3.2. Defining/Using aliases
3.3. Changing the default key bindings
3.4. Defining aliases for character sets
3.5. Setting variables based upon mailbox
3.6. Keyboard macros
3.7. Using color and mono video attributes
3.8. Ignoring (weeding) unwanted message headers
3.9. Alternative addresses
3.10. Mailing lists
3.11. Using Multiple spool mailboxes
3.12. Defining mailboxes which receive mail
3.13. User defined headers
3.14. Defining the order of headers when viewing messages
3.15. Specify default save filename
3.16. Specify default Fcc: mailbox when composing
3.17. Specify default save filename and default Fcc: mailbox at once
3.18. Change settings based upon message recipients
3.19. Change settings before formatting a message
3.20. Choosing the cryptographic key of the recipient
3.21. Adding key sequences to the keyboard buffer
3.22. Executing functions
3.23. Message Scoring
3.24. Spam detection
3.25. Setting variables
3.26. Reading initialization commands from another file
3.27. Removing hooks
4. Advanced Usage
4.1. Regular Expressions
4.2. Patterns
4.3. Using Tags
4.4. Using Hooks
4.5. External Address Queries
4.6. Mailbox Formats
4.7. Mailbox Shortcuts
4.8. Handling Mailing Lists
4.9. Editing threads
4.10. Delivery Status Notification (DSN) Support
4.11. POP3 Support (OPTIONAL)
4.12. IMAP Support (OPTIONAL)
4.13. Managing multiple IMAP/POP accounts (OPTIONAL)
4.14. Start a WWW Browser on URLs (EXTERNAL)
5. Mutt's MIME Support
5.1. Using MIME in Mutt
5.2. MIME Type configuration with mime.types
5.3. MIME Viewer configuration with mailcap
5.4. MIME Autoview
5.5. MIME Multipart/Alternative
5.6. MIME Lookup
6. Reference
6.1. Command line options
6.2. Configuration Commands
6.3. Configuration variables
6.4. Functions
7. Miscellany
7.1. Acknowledgements
7.2. About this document

1. Introduction

Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based MIME mail client. Mutt is highly configurable, and is well suited to the mail power user with advanced features like key bindings, keyboard macros, mail threading, regular expression searches and a powerful pattern matching language for selecting groups of messages.

1.1. Mutt Home Page

http://www.mutt.org/

1.2. Mailing Lists

To subscribe to one of the following mailing lists, send a message with the word subscribe in the body to list-name-request@mutt.org.

Note: all messages posted to mutt-announce are automatically forwarded to mutt-users, so you do not need to be subscribed to both lists.

1.3. Software Distribution Sites

For a list of mirror sites, please refer to http://www.mutt.org/download.html.

1.4. IRC

Visit channel #mutt on irc.freenode.net to chat with other people interested in Mutt.

1.5. USENET

See the newsgroup comp.mail.mutt.

1.6. Copyright

Mutt is Copyright (C) 1996-2005 Michael R. Elkins <me@cs.hmc.edu> and others

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.