The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

Posted Jun 17, 2004 13:07 UTC (Thu) by leonid (guest, #4891)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to mail clients: introduction

I have been a happy Mutt user for few years now. Sometimes I try other MUAs just out curiosity, but none of them came even close to replacing Mutt for me.

Mutt, of course, is not by any chance a complete solution to all the email tasks. I, myself, use this setup:

1. fetchmail retrieves my email from several places and feeds it to exim
2. exim processes email and feeds it to procmail
3. procmail filters email into different mail folders, scripts, and whatever else I want. It also passes all messages through SpamAssassin.
4. I use mutt to work with folders, search and sort for messages, and all.
5. Vim is used from mutt for composing replies.
6. Mutt then passes reply messages to exim, which in turn delivers them.

This might sound as a complex system and indeed it is. It took me few years to build it and I am still modifying it according to my needs. I have my email setup exactly as I want it to be and that allows me to process few thousand messages a day and still do something useful. :)

Here are Mutt features that I consider very valuable:

• console mode. Lightning fast with very flexible configuration. All key bindings and defaults are reconfigurable if need be.
• support for mbox and Maildir mail folders. Support for POP/POPS/IMAP/IMAPS. These are about all ways of email storage that I forsee myself using ever. :)
• threaded discussions. Something I cannot live without.
• excellent support of mailing lists. One can teach it a lot about mailing lists you are subscribed to and will recognize them and behave accordingly.
• flexible configuration that can be based on a number of things - console/xterm, destination address, current mail folder, etc...
• flexible handling of attachments. It is easy to configure which attachments you want to see automatically and which not, and how to display them to you.
• coloring. Very flexible color schemes. Colors can be assigned to headers, body, scores, matches, status, quoting, etc. These fastens the email processing a lot when you can focus on the important parts.
• flexible use of external functionality. I have a number of message processing scripts binded to comfortable keys.

There is much more, but this should give you an idea. :)

I should also mention that Mutt has an excellent documentation shipped with the package. /etc/Muttrc will have all possible options with comments and possible values. There are a lot of patches that add all sorts of wierd functionality to mutt, like support for compressed mail folders, breaking and merging of threads, etc. mutt-users mailing list is also very helpful and fast responding.

... I hope I didn't sound like a sales person from the 50s. :)

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