View Source: Mutt - Waikato Linux Users Group

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    ''"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." —Michael Elkins, original author of [Mutt]''

[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 <tt>list-reply</tt> command addresses a reply to a list post to the list but not its sender, avoiding cumbersome <tt>reply-to-all</tt> 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 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 completely [Free] software, available under the [GPL].

! See also

* MuttNotes
* [.muttrc]
* [Woodnotes Guide to the Mutt Email Client | http://therandymon.com/content/view/42/79/]
15 pages link to Mutt:
Last edited on Wednesday, April 26, 2006 1:35:47 am by AristotlePagaltzis
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