Dealing with Word Doc Attachments

The most important one to include is also the one that can make mutt so much more useful than other mail clients: an interface with antiword. This is a program that reads Microsoft Word documents and translates them to plain text. It's highly useful on its own as a document tool, but combined with mutt it becomes more powerful still. Assuming you have installed antiword on your machine, add the following to your mailcap file:

application/msword; antiword %s ; copiousoutput

And Word doc text will be displayed inline. This is an extraordinarily useful trick! If your distribution doesn't include antiword, try the application wvText instead, which works just as well.

This doesn't solve all your problems, but should solve many of them. Some broken webmail email applications don't label MIME types appropriately, which will hinder Mutt's ability to appropriately determine which application to use to open the file.