mutt: Miracle of miracles

Well, this is a first.

For years now — no, not years. For nearly a decade I’ve been yapping like a wiener dog on espresso about how I can never get GMail set up with mutt, and how I stick with alpine just because it works for me. I guess I don’t have that excuse any more.

It’ll take me a little while to get used to the arrangement, but so far so good. It’s quite speedy, I’ll give it that.

If you have any advice on getting it to work with multiple accounts (most from the same provider), I’d be happy to hear it. I can run that through DuckDuckGo though, and probably get an answer later today.

And now, let it be said that K.Mandla has finally gotten mutt to work. All credit goes to a cut-and-paste configuration on Linux and Life. Cheers. And sorry about the wiener dog yapping. 😉

P.S.: I did mention that if I found a better e-mail client I would jump ship. I stand by that. … 👿

23 thoughts on “mutt: Miracle of miracles”

thisnameisfalse 2014/01/27 at 8:20 am

Hi!:

mp3* utilities finished…. hooray!!!

No native english speaker here, so sorry for the question: do you need help to configure mutt? I am not sure if your mutt setup with many accounts does indeed work.

If you need help, please detail which providers do you use (gmail.com, outlook.com….) and if you have preferences about protocolos (IMAP vs POP)

Regards.

K.Mandla Post author2014/01/27 at 10:25 pm

I have four or five distinct Gmail accounts, and one work-related Hotmail (Live365? something like that) account that I check daily.

I think I can figure out how to manage those with mutt. In alpine, it’s just a separate rule for each account, which is not terrible, just not elegant.

I’ll work on this later this week. I like the looks of mutt. 😉

CorkyAgain 2014/01/27 at 5:32 pm

Receiving mail from multiple providers or accounts is something that can be handled at the fetchmail/procmail level.

The only time I need to *send* mail via a provider other than my default is when I’m replying to mailinglists where I’m using my gmail account. It’s a bit tricky (not to mention kludgy), but I ended up using ssmtp to send via my default provider and msmtp to send via gmail, along with some folderhooks in mutt to set the ‘sendmail’ variable as needed.

If I had more than one provider to deal with, I’d spend some time finding out whether sendmail, ssmtp or msmtp can be reconfigured on the fly. But my kludge meets my needs, so I’ve never bothered to dig any deeper.

K.Mandla Post author2014/01/27 at 10:23 pm

My initial thought is to have one configuration file for each account, then trigger mutt and point it at the appropriate configuration file. Probably there are easier ways, I just haven’t looked yet.

Thanks for the ideas though. Cheers. 🙂
1. thisnameisfalse 2014/01/30 at 4:22 am
  
  Hi!
  
  Yes, this is a correct way. You should read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mutt#Multiple_accounts in order to define keys (f2,f3…) to trigger the switching between accounts.
  
  Please, keep in mind that you must control two email’s directions: incomming e-mail (read with IMAP/POP protocol), and outgoing e-mail (SMTP protocol). Both can be controlled with mutt alone, but many people prefers to get incomming e-mail downloaded to local computer via fetchmail/getmail/offlineimap command, and send e-mails with external MTA programs (exim, msmtp…). My personal setup is a mixed “download with fetchmail, send with mutt embedded MTA”, but other options are also OK.
  
  mutt is great, but initial configuration is a pain.