Mutt

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

Mutt is a text-based email client for Unix-like systems. It was originally written by Michael Elkins in 1995 and released under the GPL version 2 or any later version.

Mutt was originally designed as a Mail User Agent (MUA) and relied on locally accessible mailbox and sendmail infrastructure. According to the Mutt homepage "though written from scratch, Mutt's initial interface was based largely on the ELM mail client". New to Mutt were message scoring and threading capabilities. Support for fetching and sending email via various protocols such as POP3, IMAP and SMTP was added later. Mutt relies on external tools for composing and filtering messages.

Contents

Mutt VT/Google Mail Setup

This will cover basic mutt configuration files for connecting to VT webmail. VT recommends using POP until the quota system is in place because POP will store local copies, but IMAP still works. These settings will get mutt working with VT's email servers, but there are other settings you probably want if you are unfamiliar with mutt.

IMAP

Anything in all caps should be replaced with your information

set imap_user = "PID@vt.edu"
set imap_pass = "PASSWORD"
set from = "PID@vt.edu"
set folder = "imaps://imap.vt.edu:993"
set spoolfile = "+Inbox"
set hostname = vt.edu
set postponed = "+Drafts"
set record = "+Sent"

If trash is compiled into mutt you can add:

set trash = "+Trash"

POP

Coming soon...

SMTP

set smtp_url = "smtps://PID@vt.edu@auth.smtp.vt.edu:465/"
set smtp_pass = "PASSWORD

If you are using GnuTLS in mutt and get an error saying the key is too small. GnuTLS supports 256 AES, but it defaults to 128 when connecting. For this you must add this:

set ssl_min_dh_prime_bits = 500

LUUGmail

Acidburn currently has functional postfix/dovecot. This is how to use it with mutt.

IMAP/SMTP for acidburn

This is a sample configuration for imap/smtp in mutt for acidburn, provided by echarlie

set realname = 'Wadsworth Luugbot'  #your display name here
set imap_user=wadsworth             #this should be your LDAP account name
set imap_pass=$my_luug_pass         #Whatever your LUUG password is. Here we used a personal variable.
set ssl_force_tls=yes
set ssl_starttls=yes

set folder = "imap://$imap_user@acidburn.vtluug.org:143/"
set spoolfile = +INBOX
set postponed = +Drafts
set record = +sent
set imap_check_subscribed

set pgp_sign_as = "wadsworth@vtluug.org"  # If you like pgp-signing things

set from = "wadsworth@vtluug.org"    #### THIS IS IMPORTANT ####
set use_from = yes
set smtp_url=smtp://$imap_user:$imap_pass@acidburn.vtluug.org:587

# this is for if you use multiple accounts. The ssl settings are necessary since we don't have a
# certified tls key right now
account-hook $folder "set imap_user=$imap_user imap_pass=$imap_pass ssl_verify_dates=no ssl_verify_host=no"

This section assumes you are using mutt with multiple accounts. For that, we reccomend putting the following into .muttrc/vtluug or something similar, and having this in your .mutt/muttrc :

source "~/.mutt/vtluug"
folder-hook $folder 'source ~/.mutt/vtluug'

Local Mail on acidburn

This is how one would read and send local mail on acidburn. This is a fully functional .muttrc, however we would suggest setting your mutt editor, setting your encoding preference (UTF-8), and changing keybindings to preference.

NOTE: storing passwords in cleartext on acidburn is not recommended, nor is storing your pgp key on acidburn so you can decrypt it

set mbox_type=Maildir           #acidburn uses maildirs
set folder=$HOME/Maildir
set spoolfile=+/
set header_cache=~/.cache/mutt  #optional; header caching speeds things up

set my_pass= <your password here>
set my_user=wadsworth

set realname = "Wadsworth Luugbot"
set from = wadsworth@vtluug.org
set use_from = yes

# This is needed if you want to send from another ldapified server
#set smtp_url=smtps://$my_user:$my_pass@acidburn.vtluug.org:587
#set ssl_force_tls = yes