Mutt

Getting Started

Mutt is an email client, and as it's author maintains: "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

Mutt is small, fast and flexible, and of course, free. Mutt was originally written by Michael Elkins, though it is now maintained by the user community. Mutt gets its name from the fact it's a hybrid, or mongrel, created from the best features of other mail clients and its own good ideas.

Mutt is mainly text based, and there are no obvious menus to tell you what to do, so it can be a little (read a lot) intimidating to get started with, but once you start using it, it is very easy to get used to.

The easiest way to get used to it is to get started, so from the prompt type "mutt"

smiles@frink:~$ mutt

The opening screen is usually blank for the first time with a tiny menu at the top informing you:

q:Quit d:Del u:Undel s:Save m:Mail r:Reply g:Group ?:Help

Navigation

Navigating through your mail or or folders on the screen is a matter of using the up and down arrows and pressing "enter" when you want to open something. Pressing q should bring you back to where you where if necessary.

Lets actually looking at the mail you have in your mailbox (whether you check it in pine or using webmail).
Using these programs means that your mail will usually be stored in the 'mbox'.
So to access your mail we need to open that mailbox to look at the mail.

Changing Folders

Changing folders is simplying a matter of pressing 'c'

Open mailbox ('?' for list):

At the bottom of the screen you should get a message the same as the one above asking you to open a mailbox - you can type "mbox" in here, but lets press '?' like it suggest to see the list of files.
Now this list of files can be very confusing, for the moment lets just ignore most of the data and look at the farmost column on the right hand side, this is the column that contains the file or folder names.
You may need to choose the "../" option to get down to your home directory.
You can see the directory you are in at the bottom of the screen on the left:

-- Mutt: Directory [~/Mail]

This means I am in the "Mail" directory which is 1 directory above the "~" (or home) directory.

Navigate using the "../" to go down a directory, until it tells you that you are in your home directory.

-- Mutt: Directory [/home/users/smiles]

Then using the arrows go to the "mbox" folder and press "enter" to open that mailbox.

Mutt's Main Screen

Lets just look at the screen in front of us before doing anything else. Looking at the bottom of the screen will tell you what folder your are in (in my case "~/mbox") how many messages you have (in my case "85") how much space they are taking up (1.2M) and then what way the messages in the folder are sorted (in my case by thread (ie. discussion type) and then by date).

---Mutt: ~/mbox [Msgs:85 1.2M]---(threads/date)

Reading Mail

Ok, so lets read some mail!

Again you navigate using the up and down arrows (or using the page-up and page-down buttons if needed) and use "enter" to open a mail.

Note that Mutt gives you a lot of the "header information" that other email clients usually hide, this is the stuff in turquoise at the top of the mail.

Now reading through an email you need to use either "enter" and "backspace" to go up and down a line at a time, "page-down" to go down a chunk at a time and "page-up" to go back up a chunk at a time. Up and Down arrows move up and down an email at a time, not through the email you are reading! (note that using "page-down" brings you onto the next email when you are finished reading one email)

Ok, so you can look up and down through the mail, but Mutt is telling you lots of things, look at the bar near the bottom (highlighted in blue):

- - 80/85: Rory Donohue Re: website

This tell you which email you are reading (number 80 out of 85), who the email is from ("Rory Donohue") and what the subject of the email was ("Re: website").

And at the top of the email the other highlighted box in blue says:

i:Exit -:PrevPg Space:NextPg v:View Attachm. d:Del r:Reply j:Next ?:Help

Ok, so this menu tell you that i will bring you back to the Index of messages. (-, Space, j are just other ways of doing "page-up", "page-down", "down arrow", etc. it's up to you to use the ones that you find easiest.). v lets you look at any attachments!

Viewing/Saving Attachments

Ok, if there any any attachments then usually you will get a message inside the email saying something like this:

[-- Attachment #2: Blank Bkgrd.gif --]
[-- Type: image/gif, Encoding: base64, Size: 0.2K --]
[-- image/gif is unsupported (use 'v' to view this part) --]

So if you press v on a mail it will tell you all the parts it is made up of, on the left it will have the name of the file if it has one (or maybe "no description" if not) and on the right it will tell you the kind of file that it is.

Press enter to open a part, usually you press q to close the different parts you opened and to get back onto the email you were looking at, and either q or i will get you back to the message index.

Sending an email

From the index you can press m to create a new email. (or by typing "mutt person@emailaddy.com" from the prompt).

At the bottom of the screen you will be prompted to enter the "To" address, then the "Subject".
Then the screen changes and you are into the actual email. (This is using the default program "vim" to send emails).

Ok, you press i or Insert to start typing the mail. (-- INSERT --) will appear at the bottom
up and down arrows, deleting, etc. all work as normal once you start typing! ('~' represents blank lines)
When you are done typing the content of the email you will want to save it and send it.
To do this press Esc (the -- INSERT -- disappears) and then type ":wq" (this tells vim to "write" and to "quit").

To cancel an email instead of sending press Esc and then type ":q!" (quit without saving).

On this screen you will see the information about the email.
Your email text is in the "attachments" list as "plain/text".
The menu at the top tells you all you need to do to add more people to the email (using the c or t options), and the other attachment option is similar to the rest of the navigation.
So press y to send!

y:Send q:Abort t:To c:CC s:Subj a:Attach file d:Descrip ?:Help

Replying to emails

Replying to emails uses the same system as sending emails, just press r when you have an email selected or open to reply to. The prompt at the bottom tells you who you are replying to and what the subject is, etc.

Sorting mail

To sort emails in your mailbox, from the index, simply press o and then the options available are shown, and choose the one in ( ) that you want.

Sort (d)ate/(f)rm/(r)ecv/(s)ubj/t(o)/(t)hread/(u)nsort/si(z)e/s(c)ore?:

Tagging Mail

Sometimes you can have a lot of mail you want to delete / sort on a large scale, ie. save all the mail from "myfriend@friedsrus.com", so the easiest way to do this is to sort the emails by sender, ie. f in the sorting options. Then use t to "tag" the mails (a "*" will appear beside them). Then to preform an operation on all tagged emails press ; and then either s to save them or d to delete them, without the ; then what you have chosen to do is only preformed on the mail that is highlighted in the index.

A D will appear next to all the emails that have been saved or deleted, and they will be deleted when you quit mutt.

And there you have it, a (not so) quick guide to Mutt, hopefully you should be able to figure out all the other parts of it now, mutt has a huge amount of functions that just take a little bit of time to come across!

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