Introduction - Why Mutt?

People have been exchanging email for decades now, making email one of the most loved aspects of the Internet. And like anything else, sending email is most satisfying when the tools you use facilitate your work. Mutt is not the tool of choice for everybody, but for some people, mutt has no equal. You too will enjoy the power and simplicity of mutt if you prefer the keyboard to the mouse, appreciate simplicity but not at the expense of power, and are particular enough about your work environment to choose tools that provide maximum configurability. Mutt is also the tool of choice for people that deal with large quantities of email and want a powerful, configurable tool.

Mutt is a console mail user agent (MUA). It is not graphical, and makes no use of the mouse. Rather, it runs from the command prompt, so you can use it on consoles where the X Window environment is not running, in virtual terminals, and in remote shell sessions. It has no buttons, sliders, or icons: it's text based. Mutt doesn't do some things you might be used to, but it does several things you never knew were possible and it does them well. Most of all, mutt is efficient and highly-configurable (like most Unix/Linux software, it has more configuration options than you'll probably ever use). It's lean and mean, and once you learn how to make mutt work for you it's hard to use anything else without feeling like the software impedes your efficiency.

Happily, mutt is so overwhelmingly configurable that one mutt user can sit down at another user's computer and be unable to do anything useful at all - it's that configurable. That means this Woodnotes guide will get you started, but you will quickly modify the keystrokes and commands to suit your own environment and make this guide obsolete. No offense taken!

Top reasons to use mutt over another mail client:

1. it's fast and efficient, and lets you keep your hands on the keyboard, where they belong.
2. you can operate on many messages at once quickly and efficiently
3. you can use it with the editor of your choice (emacs, vi, nedit, pico, etc.)
4. you know exactly what you like and therefore appreciate mutt's unsurpassed configurability
5. you want fast keystroke access to functionality and therefore appreciate mutt's powerful macro capability
6. you grew up in the stone age, like me, and prefer distraction-free, text-based computing

Great tricks to do with Mutt

1. cut to the chase when receiving a message inside a message inside a message (sec. 3.4)
2. automatically fold Word doc attachments right into the text of the message (sec. 4.9.3)
3. archive hundreds of messages at once in one simple step (sec. 3.10.4)
4. make annoying HTML email look like plain text (sec. 4.9)
5. on a dial-up connection, queue up your mail in a sendmail spool file, which is automatically sent the moment an internet connection is detected without any further interaction needed (sec. 4.4.1)
6. write powerful macros to make complex tasks into a single keystroke (sec. 5.3)
7. delete just attachments from a message without deleting the whole message (sec. 3.6)