Mutt (e-mail client)

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Mutt
Mutt in action
Developed by	Brendan Cully
Latest release	Stable 1.4.2.3; Unstable 1.5.17 / Stable May 27, 2007, Unstable November 1, 2007
OS	Unix, Linux, Windows, DOS
Genre	E-mail client
License	GPL
Website	www.mutt.org

Mutt is a text-based e-mail client for Unix-like systems. It was originally written by Michael Elkins in 1995 and released under the GNU General Public License. Initially it resembled elm. Now the program most similar to it may be the newsreader slrn.

1 Operation
2 Slogan
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Operation

Mutt supports most mail formats (notably both mbox and Maildir) and protocols (POP3, IMAP, etc). It also includes MIME support, notably full PGP/GPG and S/MIME integration.

Mutt is a pure Mail User Agent (MUA) and cannot send e-mail in isolation. To do this, it needs to communicate with a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) using, for example, the common Unix sendmail interface. More recently, SMTP support has been added. It also relies on external tools for composing and filtering messages. Also in latest Mutt versions you can use smtp_url config vars to send your mail directly from a Mutt.

It is rather configurable: it has hundreds of configuration directives and commands. It allows for changing all the key bindings and making keyboard macros for complex actions, as well as the colors and the layout of most of the interface. Through variants of a concept known as "hooks", many of its settings can be changed based on criteria such as current mailbox or outgoing message recipients. There are also many patches and extensions available that add functionality, such as NNTP support or a sidebar similar to those often found in graphical mail clients.

Mutt is fully controlled with the keyboard, and has support for mail threading, meaning one can easily move around long discussions such as in mailing lists. New messages are composed with an external text editor by default, unlike pine which embeds its own editor known as pico (though you can configure pine to shell out to an external editor).

[edit] Slogan

The mutt slogan is "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less" ^[1]. The authors of mutt claim that while all e-mail clients are flawed, mutt has fewer flaws than any of the competition.