Differences between version 11 and predecessor to the previous major change of Mutt.
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| Newer page: | version 11 | Last edited on Friday, August 29, 2003 1:44:16 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
| Older page: | version 1 | Last edited on Wednesday, January 29, 2003 4:20:18 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
@@ -1,3 +1,43 @@
-A popular console-based email client
. Recent versions support things like IMAP, SSL and TLS as well as GPG (see GPGMailClients)
.
+;: ''"All mail clients suck
. This one just sucks less
." --Michael Elkins, original author of [Mutt]''
-See [.muttrc] for an
example config file.
+[Mutt] is a popular console-based email client. Recent versions support things like [IMAP], [SSL] and [TLS] as well as gpg(1) (see [GPGMailClients]).
+
+Its greatest strength is an unsurpassed support for dealing with [MailingList]s. The threading is ''very'' smart, and it actually understands the notion of a MailingList: the list-reply command addresses a reply to a list post to the list but not its sender, avoiding cumbersome reply-to-all fiddling, and will not be confused by ReplyToMunging some evil mailing list software does either. There are many commands to allow you to efficiently select a large number of mails to operate on. Just about everything is customizable - keybinds, screen layout and colourization (including text highlighting in the pager), even the headers of all mail you generate. You can also edit all headers on the fly and individually for each mail. All of this functionality can also be bound to keys, making it simple to have an arbitrary number of mail adresses, mail servers, display configuration and anything else you can think of available at the touch of a key. It has superb support for sending mail from the CommandLine, even with attached files.
+
+If you like this kind of power and freedom, [Mutt] is your mailer of choice.
+
+Naturally, you pay a price for so much goodness: the learning curve is relatively steep, esp since the default configuration is just barely usable, forcing you to claw through much of the documentation in order to achieve a comfortable environment. Those who are willing to invest the effort however will find themselves pleasantly surprised. No other mailer enables you to deal with high mail volumes even nearly as efficiency.
+
+
+Unsurprisingly, it's very fast and takes very little memory (unlike, say, MozillaMail). Being a console program (can be linked against either [S-lang] or [Curses]) it is naturally very usable even across a SSH connection on a dial-up. Unlike [PINE], it is available under the [GPL].
+
+!! Hints and Tips
+
See [.muttrc] for example config files.
+
+If you actually want to read any html email you get, you can get mutt to delegate arbitrary mime types to other programs (it will default to your pager for text/* types). Add the following line to your .mailcap
file:
+
+ text/html ; lynx -force_html %s
+
+A more "integrating" alternative is to add __set implicit_autoview__ to your [
.muttrc] and make the .mailcap line something like
+
+ text/html ; lynx -force_html -dump %s ; copiousoutput
+
+This will cause [Mutt] to transparently invoke lynx(1) and display its output in the integrated pager for any HTML message. (__set implicit_autoview__ enables this for all [MIME] types with a __copiousoutput__ keyword.)
+
+Incidentally, [vilistextum|http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/bhaak/vilistextum/] is an excellent tool for such on-the-fly conversion of HTML, as it launches and runs nearly instantly even on old and aging machines, where [lynx|lynx(1)] takes its sweet time.
+
+!Automating messages with Mutt
+
+If you want to send a message with Mutt with an attachment, like you would with mail(1), use:
+
+ mutt -a $FILENAME -s $SUBJECT $TO < /dev/null
+
+cat'ing a file into mutt doesn't seem to work the same way.
+
+!Using maildir
+
+If you use Maildir format mailboxes (for example, Courier IMAP) and you want to read them locally with Mutt:
+
+ export MAIL=~/Maildir/
+and insert the following line into .muttrc:
+ set folder=~/Maildir/
