General Settings

In this section of the .muttrc file we establish a couple of general things. ``set charset'' determines which character set your terminal is using. In many cases it's not important, but if your display is showing funny characters in place of accented characters like á or ñ or even the little arrows that show where the messages have been threaded, this is how you can deal with it.

''unset beep'' disables annoying beeps. ``confirmappend'' is a setting that has mutt ask you every time you save messages to a given folder, and ``use domain'' is an option that adds the local domain name to any email sent to an address without an @ sign (so if you send a message to ``jeremy'', not ``jeremy@sample.com'' mutt will change the name to ``jeremy@localhost''). That's not usually useful, so I usually unset it. Turning off the recall function prevents mutt from asking you at the start of every session if you'd like to resume a postponed message (provided postponed messages exist, of course). Since I infrequently start messages I don't finish, I turn off that attribute. And you can always resume postponed messages any time you want by pressing Control-r in mutt. Finally, `push <show-version>' simply tells mutt to display its version number upon start up, just for fun.

# Starting up, General Settings
set charset=UTF8			
#depending on our environment it could be ISO-8859-1 (Western Latin)

set mailbox_type=maildir
#default mailbox format (could be maildir, mbox or several others)

unset beep				
#don't need no beeping software

set print_command="lpr -p"			
#Send your message to the line printer. If you've added the mutt-print
#package, use the following line instead:
set print_command="mutt-print %s"

unset confirmappend			
#append what?

unset use_domain
set recall=no				
#don't resume postponed messages

push <show-version>			
#get Mutt to show its version on startup

set quit=ask-yes			
#Ask before quitting, but default to yes

set nomove				
#keep messages in MAIL, don't ask about moving them anywhere when quitting

unset mark_old				
#don't mark messages as old when I pass over them with the cursor

These are just several of the hundreds of configuration parameters over which mutt gives you control. This is what people mean when they say mutt is highly configurable. For more settings and a glimpse of what your options are, read the muttrc man page or mutt's online documentation (see sec. 5 for the URL).

Now let's look at the settings that affect our general interaction with mutt. The following lines of code establish my name and email address. `set include' gives you the opportunity of automatically stripping out the message you're replying to in the text of your email. Mutt can also by default hide the ``Cc'' and ``Bcc'' lines of the address if you don't typically use them. I don't BCC anybody, so in my .muttrc I have unset that option, leaving only ``cc''s. ``unset self'' is a great feature I wish other email clients would implement. When replying to a group email, mutt is smart enough to recognize and remove your address from the list of recipients so you don't accidentally send yourself the message.

The following two lines deal with attribution of replies and forwarded messages. You could change this so that in an email reply, underneath your text it reads ``On July 4, 2005, you vomited up the following nonsense:'' or equivalent.

# Composing Messages
set from="Randall Wood <my_email@address.com>"  
#My name and email address as shown in other people's inboxes
set include=yes					
#include message in replies
set askcc					
#include a cc: line on which to add recipients
# set askbcc					
#include a bcc: line
set fcc_attach					
#forward attachments
unset reply_self				
#don't include myself when replying to a group
set attribution="On %d, %n wrote:"
set forward_format="Fwd: %s"
set indent_str="> "				
#indented text prefaced by this string.
set postpone=ask-no				
#default for postponing a message is to confirm, default to no
set tilde