HTML Email

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 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 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 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(1)ing a file into mutt doesn't seem to work the same way.

Mutt (and most other command-line mail programs) take stdin(3) to be the body of the message. That won't work if you expect it to add all the nice MIME headers and stuff for attachments.

Forcing headers

To have a more descriptive From: than just root when you happen to be mailing from that account (not something you should do habitually), add these settings to your .muttrc

my_hdr From: test@example.com
set realname="Real Name"

Hooking up with Courier IMAP mailboxes

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/

Part of CategoryMailNotes