is mutt a good email client?

[Tyir]

I am thinking of ditching my long-used sylpheed, there are a couple things about it that bug me...

i am considering 2, thunderbird and mutt, the 2 sides of the spectrum, it seems to me

I have been moving more-and-more towards text-based programs...so am thinking of giving mutt a whirl.

my question is, do you think that mutt sitll stacks up well against modern clients (such as thunderbird)?

[papal_authority]

Hell yes. I find the key to Mutt is having small fast MIME handlers like Dillo (HTML) and QIV (images) for MIME handling.

[gnuageux]

Mutts great!

[Lunchy]

I've fallin in love with mutt. It's customizable in the extreme, so much so that I've given up graphical email clients. However, the downside to something being very customizable is the learning curve, which for me was kinda steep. But now that I took the time to understand it better and get it set up the way I like, it was totally worth the effort and now I can do everything I wished the graphical clients would do. Long story short, I highly recommend it.

[steel300]

I'm going to put just a little more emphasis on the steep learning curve. But with that learning curve, it can do anything you want it to do. I even got it working with kerberos authentication.

[Dr Evil]

I absolutely love Mutt. Won't go back to a graphical client if I can help it.

I'm only using the basic setup in the Mutt guide I saw floating in the Gentoo docs somewhere, but for me that's more than sufficient.

[tristure]

I don't know about Mutt but I tried Thunderbird and I'm not very enthusiastic about it.
Firefox rocks big time but Thunderbird really isn't there yet. It's terribly slow imho, and doesn't look that good.

Don't flame me, but I would personaly advise you to try Kmail if you're in KDE. It's very fast on my my box, very good looking and much more usable than thunderbird.

I'll try mutt one of these days, though.

[tristure]

[Double post, sorry]

[tristure]

[Oh, triple post!! Sorry again]

[aethyr]

I love mutt. I have a shortcut to start it up in an xterm window, and it starts up and displays my inbox in about 2 seconds.

I think the key to really enjoying mutt is learning the shortcut keys, and learning to set up a muttrc that suits your needs. Mutt allows for a great amount of customization.

As far as shortcut keys, some of my more common are:
'/' - search
'TAB' - next unread message
'D' - delete pattern
'l' - limit displayed messages
'o' - organize

Lots more too that I'm not remembering, but mutt is very convenient once you get used to it.

[Tyir]

hey, thanks for recommending it to me guys! (too late, actually, since I had switched full-time to mutt a couple days after the post!)

It really is an amazing client, I love pulling it up through the putty ssh client for windows..


another useful tip I learned, press t to 'tag' a message, then tag as many as you want, and then ; to finish tagging. then you can move/delete them all at one.

[BlinkEye]

does someone know how to display unread (not new) messages in the folder preview?

the BIG PROBLEM is that mutt displays only the new message in the mailboxes (i.e. once mutt is closed a still unread new message loses its status "new" even though it is still new and is treated as unread). i understand that this might be of use but then i NEED a flag for unread messages.

this is my folder format:

Code: Select all

set folder_format="%N %F %2l %-8.8u %-8.8g %8s %d %f"

i'd appreciate any hack to circumvent this issue, i really hate to go every time through my bunch of folders.

idea: if i could jump from new/unread message to another one i'd be satisfied for the moment. but i haven't figured out how to do that (i use imap)

[aethyr]

does someone know how to display unread (not new) messages in the folder preview?

the BIG PROBLEM is that mutt displays only the new message in the mailboxes (i.e. once mutt is closed a still unread new message loses its status "new" even though it is still new and is treated as unread). i understand that this might be of use but then i NEED a flag for unread messages.

this is my folder format:

Code: Select all

set folder_format="%N %F %2l %-8.8u %-8.8g %8s %d %f"

i'd appreciate any hack to circumvent this issue, i really hate to go every time through my bunch of folders.

idea: if i could jump from new/unread message to another one i'd be satisfied for the moment. but i haven't figured out how to do that (i use imap)

I'm confused as to what you mean, here's what happens to me when I use mutt to read imap:

I get a new email, it is marked as "N". If I don't read it, and exit mutt and come back, it is then marked "O" as old. However, you can change this behavior with the following (as found in `man muttrc`):

Code: Select all

       mark_old
              Type: boolean
              Default: yes
 
              Controls whether or not mutt marks new unread messages as old if
              you exit a mailbox without reading them.  With this option  set,
              the  next time you start mutt, the messages will show up with an
              "O" next to them in the index menu,  indicating  that  they  are
              old.

Does that solve your problem? If not, you're going to have to be a bit more clear as to what the issue is.

[Tyir]

Yep, if there is a new message, but you close mutt, it should be marked with an O

[pjp]

Moved from Other Things Gentoo.

[Stormy Eyes]

Mutt rules. Read this HOWTO.

[slarti`]

Mutt is excellent. The documentation is both thorough and clear, so check http://www.mutt.org out.

My system looks something like this:

• Getmail from dev.gentoo.org and mail.edgeoftheinterweb.org.uk using SSL and IMAP in the first instance, POP3 in the second.
• Procmail for sorting and filtering. First of all, all mail is filtered through clamassassin (a spamassassin-like interface to clamav which I maintain). Then I use it to catch duplicates, filter HTML mail, correct Lines: headers so that Mutt can correctly display the number of lines in the message even when it's stored in a maildir, reformat old-style PGP messages to MIME, mailing list filtering, then spamassassin and razor for spam filtering on the remaining likely-spam mail.
• Mutt
• Vim
• Msmtp, another package I maintain. A full featured SMTP client, designed for use with mutt.

So much stuff here just cannot be done in other mail clients, whether it's procmail or mutt that's doing the work. For instance, I have two mail accounts, and I use send-hooks to change my account and various other settings depending on who I'm sending to. I use folder-hooks to colour mail based on regular expressions in the subject, or sender. Seriously useful for filtering rubbish.

Never forget `?'. If you're stuck, it's always there for you.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Mutt sucks.

It sucks less than the other clients, though :p.

[WhyteWolf]

honestly I love mutt


heres a sample of my muttrc on a debian server I'm always sshing into

Code: Select all

source ~/.muttconf/profiles/profile.active
macro index X "!~/muttprofile\n:source ~/.muttconf/profiles/profile.active\n" "Call muttprofile and load profile"
source ~/.muttconf/muttfolders
source ~/.muttconf/spamlearn
send-hook (lvlug@lvlug.org) $ "source ~/.muttconf/profiles/profile.four-twenty\n"
send-hook (unleashed@lvlug.org) $ "source ~/.muttconf/profiles/profile.four-twenty\n"


set sort=threads        # sorting the mails in threads
set sort_aux=date-sent  # sort brother mails inside threads


source ~/.muttconf/muttcolor

set realname = WhyteWolf
set reverse_name = yes
set reverse_realname = yes

set alternates = "whytewolf@four-twenty.com"
set edit_headers = yes
set weed = no
set status_on_top = yes
set timeout = 10
set quit = ask-yes
set arrow_cursor = yes
set pager_context = 1
set pager_stop = yes
set markers = no
set signature = "~/.signature"
set askbcc = yes
set askcc = yes
set record = ~/Mail/Sent
set folder = "~/Mail/"
set spoolfile = imap://localhost

mailboxes ! `find ~/Mail/ -type f ! -name "Sent" ! -name ".*" ! -name "*.archive" ! -regex ".*Archives.*" -printf "=%P "` imap://localhost

macro   index   <left>  ':mailboxes `find ~/Mail/ -type f ! -name "Sent" ! -name ".*" ! -name "*.archive" ! -regex ".*Archives.*" -printf "=%P "`<enter>c?<toggle-mailboxes>'


subscribe lvlug@ lvlug-unleashed@ phpmyadmin-users@ phpmyadmin-news@ gentoo-gwn@ openmosix-general@

folder-hook spam push 'D.\n'
set sort_alias = alias
set alias_file=~/.muttconf/addresses
source ~/.muttconf/addresses

and thats a small sample ... not to mention it's old i REALLY need to update it cause of some changes that were made to my mailing lists ... as well as a few other tweaks ...

this isn't the full config either as can be seen by all the sourceing ...

but needlesss to say I have control over spamassassin with in mutt ... as well as a few folder tweaks to auto scan my folders when I press the left arrow key ... and auto profiling so that depending on which folder I'm viewing changes who I am replying as

wish I could remeber how I found most of this stuff i know the profile scripting was something I dug up out of googleing for a few min ... and the folder scan was just a random muttrc I found

[yakapiece]

definitely mutt

[Tyir]

For some reason Blinkeye used my post to ask a mutt question, but there is no point of convincing me, I've been a full-time mutt user Since June (check the dates!)

Yes, mutt is awsome