What is Mutt?
Mutt is a Mail User Agent (MUA) for Unix. It is a descendant of ELM,
borrowing ideas from other MUAs, like PINE and Mush. Right now it's a
text mode application, not an X program. But that might change one
day.
Who wrote Mutt?
Michael Elkins is the author. Many people have contributed to Mutt,
please read the ChangeLog in the Mutt distribution for details.
Mutt is now maintained by the people on the mutt-dev@mutt.org mailing
list, Michael has changed jobs and now has to use NT.
I'm ELM user. Is Mutt compatible with ELM?
Well, yes. Mostly. Mutt has many enhancements over ELM, so it is not
100% compatible. But the standard key mappings are a lot like the ELM
ones. A lot Mutt users are ELM converts. See Sven's giant ELM vs. Mutt comparison!
I'm an average user. Why should I switch to Mutt?
The top two reasons to switch are color support and threading.
Mutt can display messages with colors, if your terminal/xterm supports
it. The SGI console, the Solaris dtterm, the Linux color_xterm and the
freely available rxvt are example of xterms with color support. The
xterm that comes with
XFree86 does, too. Ask your system administrator about colors if
doesn't work out-of-the-box.
Mutt can thread mails. This is especially useful for folders with
mailing lists. The output looks like this:
11 D Oct 1 Sven Guckes ( 17) Re: Colors, Toolbar, FreeBSD and Mutt
12 D Oct 1 Christoph P. Ku ( 31) +->
13 D Oct 1 Ollivier Robert ( 14) |->
14 Oct 1 Brandon Long ( 162) +->
15 D Oct 1 Sven Guckes ( 8) sending from editor
16 D Oct 1 Michael Elkins ( 11) +->
Mutt features xterm mouse support but it was removed around 0.65 because
it is an ncurses feature and most people compile Mutt with S-Lang.
I'm an experienced user. Why should I switch to Mutt?
Besides color and threading, Mutt allows arbitrary key remapping and has
tons of options. You can customize almost everything. Mutt is 8-bit
clean, uses Locales, and has a wonderful MIME implementation. Well, I'm
a little biased, so don't trust me and try for yourself. Mutt boasts
PGP/MIME support as well! Mutt can open a web browser for you with an
URL from the mail body (the functionality has been moved to the external
program urlview which is available at the same place where you
got Mutt itself).
I'm the admin. Why should I install Mutt?
Because you'll love it!
Admins often have to handle large mail volumes and don't have much time.
Mutt is small, so it won't take long to start up. Mutt comes with a GNU
autoconf "configure" script, so it's easy to install. Your
users will love Mutt.
If you mount your mail spool directory via
NFS, you will be delighted to hear that Mutt actually does locking the
right way!
Is Mutt free?
Yes. Mutt is copyrighted by Michael Elkins and covered by the GNU
General Public License.
Where can I download Mutt?
- ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt
- ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/mail/mutt
How can I report bugs?
Wait! Before you report bugs, please have a look at Sven's bug
reporting page. Maybe your bug has already been
fixed? Check the mailing
list archives, too.
Mutt dumps core when I press Ctrl-Compose-Shift-F12
So don't do it! ;-)
Seriously, if Mutt dumps core on you, please submit the problem to the
mutt-users mailing list
<mutt-users@mutt.org> or to the mutt-dev mailing list.
Please check that you are able to reproduce the problem. Then write
down the steps that are necessary to recreate the problem, the Mutt
version number, and the operating system you are using (use "uname
-a"
to find out).
If you really want to help us fix the bug, you can give us a
stack dump. Mutt compiles with "-g" to enable debugging
information by default. So if it dumps core, please follow these steps:
$ gdb /usr/local/bin/mutt core
GDB is free software and you are welcome to distribute copies of it
under certain conditions; type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB; type "show warranty" for details.
GDB 4.16 (i586-unknown-linux), Copyright 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc...
[some other stuff]
(gdb) bt
[some dump]
(gdb) q
$
Now please send us the dump! If you are a programmer, and you think you
can fix the bug yourself, a diff will be greatly appreciated.
Someone posted a patch for Mutt. How do I apply it?
Change into the directory with Mutt. Then pipe the patch (or the mail
with the patch, patch is quite clever in this respect) through
patch -s -p1. The "-s" disables unwanted (by me, at least)
verbosity. The "-p1" removes the first directory from the file names.
OK, I fixed this bug, how do I make a diff?
That's quite easy. First, get yourself GNU diff. The other diffs will
work, too, but this tutorial only applies to GNU diff. We want unified
diffs.
- Rename the directory with your new, patched Mutt to, say, mutt-patched
- Unpack the original distribution
- Now type "diff -uNr mutt-0.46 mutt-patched > diff"
This is for GNU diff. You vendor's diff may not know the -u option, in
which case you should try -c instead.
The "-u" creates a unified diff, which has 3 lines of context per
default. This has the advantage that patches can be applied to other
versions of Mutt, too.
The "-N" treats new files as empty. That means if you add a file, diff
will put it in the diff, too. This has the advantage that your file is
not lost. It has the disadvantage that "configure", "Makefile",
"config.h" and so on are put into the diff, too. So for patches where
you don't add new files, you can omit the "-N".
The "-r" means recursive. For Mutt this is only important if you change
the documentation. But it's good habit to use it.
I have a question not answered here!
Please subscribe to the Mutt mailing lists. There are three mailing
lists:
Subscribe by sending an email to mutt-announce-request@mutt.org
(or mutt-users-request or mutt-dev-request,
respectively) with the word "subscribe" in the body of the mail (the
subject will be ignored).
Suggestions regarding the FAQ can of course be directed to me at
felix-muttfaq@fefe.de (My name's Fefe or Felix von
Leitner), but please do not ask me general questions about Mutt.
Instead, subscribe to the Mutt users mailing list and ask the questions
there. Probably you will get your answer much quicker there.
Since I have been specifically asked a few times: Yes, there is a
Usenet newsgroup about Mutt, and it's called comp.mail.mutt.
Mutt cannot read my mail spool!
Mutt can't dotlock my mailbox!
Mutt always sets my mail folder read-only!
Mutt has found out that your system mail directory is not world
writable. Under these circumstances, all MUAs need to be setgid (don't
worry if you don't know what this means). Only the system administrator
can do this, mere users cannot.
Mutt circumvents the security problems that setgid brings by only making
the external program mutt_dotlock setgid, which is small enough
to be checked by your admin.
A workaround is to have your mail put into a mail box in your home
directory. Then you configure Mutt with the --with-homespool option.
But how do you put the mail in your home directory? Easy. You do this
with your .forward file. Do you already have a .forward file
in your home directory? If you do, you are probably using a mail filter
like Procmail or mailagent or the ELM filter. Just read the manual for
your filter program to find out how to tell the program where the
default folder for the mail is. With procmail, you can do this by
putting the following line in your .procmailrc:
DEFAULT=$HOME/Mailbox
If you don't have a .forward file and your site does not use
procmail implicitly (ask your sysadmin if you are unsure!), just execute
this command:
$ echo $HOME/Mailbox > $HOME/.forward
If you use qmail, Postfix or Exim, I recommend that you use the Maildir mail
folder format. Please see the MTA documentation for details.
What happened to "browse_url" and "set browser"?
The functionality was moved to the "urlview" program. You can get it
where you got Mutt.
Mutt puts email addresses in the References header!
Mutt generates broken References headers!
This is not a bug. The References header is generated from In-Reply-To.
If the email you are replying to puts email addresses there, Mutt has no
way to know which is the Message-ID and which is the email address. For
example,
In-Reply-To: message from <felix@convergence.de>;
<19991014171458.A1701@convergence.de>
will trigger this. The solution is to fix the mail program that
produces this mail not to enclose the email address in angle
brackets.
How can I import my ELM aliases?
you can easily transform Elm's aliases to Mutt's alias format
using ELM's utility "elmalias":
elmalias -u -f "alias %a\t%n\t<%v>"
Or, as Gregory Seidman recommends (this one also converts group aliases):
elmalias -u -f "alias %a\t%n\t<%v>" | sed 's/,/>,</g' |\
awk -F' ' '/,/ { print $1,$3; next }
{print}' -
Why can I start two Mutts simultaneously? ELM and PINE didn't let me do this.
This is a feature. If you modify the folder in one Mutt, then
synchronize, the other Mutt will try to merge the differences as good as
it can.
I set alias_file but Mutt does not know my aliases!
What is the difference between source and alias_file?
The difference is that alias_file will tell Mutt where it should
append new alias definitions while source will read the
specified file (which may include more than just aliases definitions).
So, if you use alias_file you probably also want to
source the alias file.
Why is Mutt so slow over NFS?
This has been sped up greatly in the current version. Especially since
Mutt can partially update folders. Previous versions of this FAQ
recommended that you disable fcntl locking. Do not do this! Recent NFS
implementations use client side caching and fcntl locking seems to be
the only portable way to tell the client to update the read cache. You
risk losing mails!
If Mutt simply hangs and then says that it could not acquire kernel locks
and you use Linux as client, you might have forgotten to start portmap
on your local box and the kernel lockd times out trying to connect to
it.
Mutt leaves files called "mutt.host.123.234~" or "mutt.host.123.234.bak" behind
it!
This is your editor, not Mutt. It is probably a good idea to modify
your editor so it won't create backup files for your mails. If you use
Emacs, you can put a line like this in your .muttrc:
set editor = "/usr/bin/emacs %s --eval '(setq make-backup-files nil)'"
I have been told that Emacs users gain efficiency by using "emacsclient"
instead of "emacs", which will use an existing Emacs session instead of
firing up a new instance.
Vim won't leave
backups behind it by default. And if you want backups per default, but
not for mutt, you can use set backupskip=mutt-<hostname>*
(thanks to Norvell Spearman for the tip).
Liviu Daia
<daia@stoilow.imar.ro> adds:
Apart from the editor, Ispell can be another source of stale backup
files in $tmpdir: by default, Ispell doesn't delete the files with names
longer than 14 characters, and the temporary files created by Mutt may
have longer names; in order to fix this, the definition of "MAXNAMLEN"
in the file "config.X" in the Ispell sources has to be modified to 1024
(or whatever is the limit on the current system), and Ispell must be
recompiled;
Can Mutt be configured to rename folders at the end of the month,
like Pine?
No. And that's on purpose. This can be done with a cron job, for
example. Or you can tell Mutt to write to the correct folder in the
beginning with muttrc-statements like these:
send-hook . "set record=~/mail/sent-mail-`date +%Y-%m`"
set record="=sent-mail-`date +%Y-%m`"
The internal pager segfaults when I do nothing for 30 seconds
The internal pager times out after 60 seconds
You are using Solaris, right? Add the line "set timeout=0" to
your .muttrc and you should be fine. The timeout() call does not work
correctly under Solaris. (This has been fixed Solaris 2.4+, AFAIK)
I keep getting HTML attachments.
Yes. And with recent Mutt versions, there is help. Just add one of
these to your ~/.mailcap:
text/html; lynx -force_html %s; needsterminal;
text/html; elinks -default-mime-type text/html %s; needsterminal;
Alternatively you can use autoview, which makes mutt display the
attachments inline. Then you have to add set
implicit_autoview to your muttrc and one of these to your
~/.mailcap:
text/html; lynx -dump -force_html %s; needsterminal; copiousoutput;
text/html; elinks -dump -dump-charset utf-8 -default-mime-type text/html %s; needsterminal; copiousoutput;
I recommend elinks over lynx because of
its superior HTML rendering.
Mutt displays the umlauts as question marks.
Mutt asks your system C library whether a character is printable or not.
Whether a character is printable or not depends on your locale settings.
You change this by setting the LC_CTYPE environment variable to
the correct setting, which depends on your operating system, please read
the relveant documentation. My setting is de_DE ("de" is the
language code for German, "DE" is the ISO country code for Germany, try
the top level domain of your country) which works for newer Linux
systems. Another value to try out are UTF-8. But this is
system dependent, so please do read the locale section of your manual.
I keep getting strange Microsoft attachments. (Word, Excel, RTF, etc)
Well, besides educating the Windows users not to use proprietary
technology, you can convert the attachments using StarOffice, Abiword or Antiword. There are other
converters, too. Please ask Freshmeat or Google for them.
How can I change the Mail-Followup-To Header?
Simply set mutt's edit_hdrs variable, and supply one yourself. Mutt
will generate a Mail-Followup-To header if and only if you didn't supply
one, and the message is directed to at least one subscribed mailing
list.
With Maildir, all the messages have a length of 0!
That is because the headers don't contain a "Lines:" header. You can
use this procmail recipe to fix it (courtesy of Liviu Daia and Alex
Shnitman, who continue to shorten this recipe):
:0 Bfh
* H ?? !^Lines:
* -1^0
* 1^1 ^.*$
| formail -A "Lines: $="
As Chris Pinard pointed out: this assumes that you have a way to store
mails in a maildir from procmail. Maildir is the mail folder format
advocated by DJ Bernstein of qmail fame. Recent procmails have built-in
support for maildir, or you can use safecat
or an equivalent program.
Several people have pointed out that you can simply switch to %c in your
index_format to show the number of bytes in the message.
Liam Routt adds that the config file line for maildrop users is
xfilter "reformail -a'Lines: $LINES'"
(add this to your ~/.mailfilter).
Color doesn't work. All I get is a bold (bright) font.
- Are you using a version of screen
older than 3.7.1? Then you will have to upgrade to at least 3.7.1.
- Does the terminal you use really support color?
- Is your $TERM set correctly? Some users always set
$TERM to vt100. Try setting it to xterm or
xterm-color, or, on systems with a recent terminfo database,
rxvt.
- Did you actually configure colors? ;-)
- If you are using S-Lang Mutt, try setting the COLORTERM environment
variable to anything (zsh/bash: export COLORTERM=foo).
If it still does not work, you can follow these instructions:
$ mkdir ~/.terminfo/
$ mkdir ~/.terminfo/v
$ mkdir ~/.terminfo/x
Save this file as ~/.terminfo/v/vt102-c.
Save this file as ~/.terminfo/x/xterm-color.
$ export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo; export TERM=xterm-color;
$ mutt
When I send away mail, the From: address is wrong!
Previous versions of Mutt had to be recompiled with different options to
configure. Now you can set the options in your
.muttrc (or, preferably, the system Muttrc)!
- If you know that your MTA (sendmail, qmail) qualifies user names
correctly, i.e. converts "From: me" to "From: me@isp.com", then put
set nouse_domain in your .muttrc.
- If your MTA generates valid From: lines for you, you can put
set nouse_from in your .muttrc.
- If your MTA generates wrong addresses and Mutt generates a bad
domain part in your From: address by default, put this in the .muttrc:
set hostname="isp.com"
- Use my_hdr From: Real Name <name@domain>
How can I make Mutt use a SMTP server to send email, like Pine or
[insert favourite Windows-based email client here]?
Use the smtp_url
configuration option.
How do I tell Mutt not to quote the signature?
There once was an unofficial patch for Mutt which is now maintained by
Stefan 'Sec' Zehl and can be retrieved
from http://www.42.org/~sec/mutt/.
The suggested method is to tell your editor to do it. For
example, uses of the VIM editor should put this line
in their .vimrc:
au BufRead /tmp/mutt* normal :g/^> -- $/,/^$/-1d^M/^$^M^L
Another solution was proposed by Markus
Muss is this shell script:
#!/bin/sh
#
# sigkiller: delete last foreign signatur when quoting mails
# (foreign dashes = "> -- " or "> --"
#
# Markus Muss
#
awk '{if ($0 ~ /^> -- ?$/) {
while ($0 !~ /^-- $/) {
getline
}
print " " > OUTFILE
}
print $0 > OUTFILE
}' OUTFILE=$1.out $1
mv $1.out $1
in conjunction with
set editor="sigkiller %s; joe -nobackups +\`awk '/^$/ {print i+2; exit} {i++}' %s\` -wordwrap -rmargin 70 %s
How can I browse my list of aliases
answer from Mikko H?nninen
Press the TAB key when in the To: or Cc: prompt.
I accidentally entered some strange prompt and Ctrl-C or Esc don't
work! Help!
Use Ctrl-G. Please do read the manual. There are a ton of useful
non-obvious keys and functions. This FAQ will not list any more key
bindings, you have to read the documentation.
Mutt sometimes display the thread tree with an asterisk! What
gives?
Normally, a part of the thread tree looks like this: +->. But
sometimes, it looks like this: *->. The difference is that the
first is a real thread, the second is a pseudo thread. Email headers
contain lines that identify the email being replies to. But some broken
mailing list software deletes these headers, so Mutt can not properly
identify threads. If two mails have identical subjects, Mutt considers
them to be in a pseudo thread and displays them with the asterisk
("star") character. This can group unrelated mails together but some
people like it better. If you don't want pseudo threads, simply set
strict_threads in your .muttrc. You can do this on a per-folder
basis with folder-hooks.
mutt -f =foo displays /tmp_mnt/home/luser/Mail/foo as folder name
This is a SunOS 4 problem. A solution is to set $HOME to /tmp_mnt$HOME.
Why doesn't Mutt use the background color of my xterm?
Mutt now does, with S-Lang and with ncurses 4.1 or later.
You can even have background pixmaps with rxvt. See http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~kesim/mutt/
for a screenshot.
I'd like to get my mail via IMAP!
Mutt does now officially support IMAP. Please upgrade to a recent
version and use --enable-imap and preferably
--with-ssl if you have OpenSSL installed to get SSL encryption
for your IMAP connections.
Then you simply set your spoolfile to "{mailhost/ssl}INBOX" to
access your email (replace mailhost with the name or IP of your IMAP
server and omit the "/ssl" if you don't have SSL support). INBOX is the
canonical name for your mail spool via IMAP. With IMAP, you can have
more than one mail folder and access them with
"{mailhost/ssl}INBOX/foo with the name foo.
I can't access my IMAP folders on UW-imapd
Try an extra slash, e.g.
imap://groups.washington.edu//eecs
instead of
imap://groups.washington.edu/eecs
I always get 'key not bound' errors when using the cursor keys
There are two possibilities. Either your terminfo/termcap database is
wrong about the cursor key strings, then please upgrade terminfo. You
can get it at http://www.catb.org/~esr/terminfo/,
and it's part of the ncurses distribution, too, so consider installing
the latest ncurses. The other possibility is that you are using a very
slow or noisy modem line and the last byte of the cursor key string
arrives so late that the timeout is over and you get the effects of A B
C or D. In this case, if you are using S-Lang (which you probably are),
try putting ESCDELAY=300; in main.c and recompile Mutt.
I'd like to switch from ELM, but I don't want to lose my aliases!
Fear not, for there is a small nawk script by afx@ibm.de that converts the ELM
aliases. Just append the output to your .muttrc.
I typed the wrong PGP passphrase and Mutt didn't notice!
The problem is that not all versions of PGP properly signal their
success with the exit code. So Mutt has a command called
forget-passphrase which, not surprisingly, forgets the
passphrase so that you can enter it again when Mutt calls PGP the next
time. The default keybinding for forget-passphrase is
Control-F.
Some user complained that my PGP messages are attachments!
That user is using obsolete and broken software. PGP/MIME is the only
way to use PGP with email that is actually specified (RFC 2015) and not
some proprietary ad-hoc crap. Tell that other user to get rid of his
legacy crap mail software and install standards compliant software. RFC
2015 is from 1996, by the way, so no mail software author can say he
didn't have enough time to implement this.
configure does not find my ncurses.h in /foo/bar/include/ncurses!
Try ./configure --with-curses=/foo/bar. By the way: recent
ncurses versions don't have ncurses.h, only curses.h. Consider
upgrading.
I use Mutt with qmail and all my messages arrive twice!
Some people take the sendmail invocation line from the qmail FAQ and put
it in their muttrc. Please remove that line from your .muttrc.
