Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

elasticdog · 2006-08-30 20:46:56

Well, it seems like everyone and their dog (pun intended) has been mentioning mutt lately in the forums: · What is the best* e-mail client?
· What do you use to read/write eMails under Arch?
· muttng and unstable packages.txt
· mail server setup
Seeing all of the people that use it, it piqued my curiosity and I've been reading up on mutt a bit. One point of confusion is muttng...with no official releases, and what looks like has been a while updating their development blog, why is it the choice for mutt fans? I seems like mutt is more active, but maybe that's just an outsider's perspective.

Also, with all of the various configuration options I've read about:
· msmtp / getmail / procmail
· mutt / fetchmail / procmail / msmtp
· muttng / offlineimap / nbsmtp
· getmail / procmail / mutt / esmtp
What do you guys run and what is your reasoning? I find the whole thing confusing, but very intriguing to set up on my own machine. I don't think I'd actually want to set up my own mail server, but use mutt to pull all of my current accounts from all over the place so I could manage them in one spot.

dk · 2006-08-30 21:06:26

fetchmail/procmail/mutt/nbsmtp

Then I just go to gmail

phrakture · 2006-08-30 21:48:28

fetchmail-procmail is the easiest setup, except for maybe getmail-procmail. The most complicated part of that is configuring your procmail sorting rules. For an example, take a look here:
http://phraktured.net/config/.procmailrc.fake

One thing to note is that I have a series of rules in there to take 99% of mailing lists I've seen and put them in their own folder. Ths is nice because I don't need custom sorting rules. I also removed a series of rules to sort emails from my girlfriend, work, friends, etc into their own mailbox, but see the "myself@someplace" rule for an example.

The choice between nbsmtp, msmtp, and esmtp is real trivial. I chose msmtp because it was in the main repos.

Anyway, here's my config series for reference (important stuff is removed):
http://phraktured.net/config/.fetchmailrc.fake
http://phraktured.net/config/.procmailrc.fake
http://phraktured.net/config/.msmtprc.fake

As for mutt(ng) itself, that's a whole huge can of worms... see here http://phraktured.net/config/.muttng/

patroclo7 · 2006-08-31 08:22:51

I am the guy with getmail + procmail + mutt + esmtp.
Well, I have no compelling argument to justify my preference for getmail over the traditional fetchmail, because I do not really use the extrafunctionality of getmail (it could replace procmail, being able to filter and deliver incomning mails, but this features are somewhat crude nowadays).

On the contrary, the main reason to use esmtp instead of msmtp & co. is that esmtp is able to deliver local mail, while reteianing all the features of the other apps (e.g, starttls support). Local mail is quite useful also in a linux personal desktop, e.g. when cron jobs send mails to the machine administrator. Esmtp allows you to treat remote and local mail with a unique smtp agent. This can be also done with the big sendmail replacements (exim, postfix, qmail...), but in 99% of the situations you actually do not need the complexity of these major players.

The only problem with esmtp is that it does not support aliases, so you have to replace aliases with proper procmail recipes (e.g. send a carbon copy of all the mails for root to the actual administrator user).

onearm · 2006-08-31 08:38:58

Mutt/Fetchmail/Procmail/Postfix here

I know that procmail isn't the more userfriendly piece of software ever created (instead, it's pretty confusing), but I learned it 2 years ago with this page: http://pm-doc.sourceforge.net/pm-tips.html
and I haven't bothered yet to try some alternatives. Honestly sometimes procmail gives me headaches to write a not so common rule, but I can live with it.

For the smtp part, I never liked the small apps like esmtp and the like, they look to me too simplistic (but they work well, I won't argue on this), I prefer a more complete MTA as Postfix. But I'm a bit weird in this because I like to learn very difficult things to do very simply tasks. For example, once I installed Qmail on a Linux From Scratch installation, only for fun

palandir · 2006-08-31 08:46:10

Well, I've written mutt, but I'm using muttng because it has a few nice features (sidebar especially).
So I recommend:
- muttng as the mail user agent
- msmtp as the mail transfer agent (actually, it just forwards your mail to a specified MTA)
- getmail for receiving mail (I find it easier to configure than fetchmail, but fetchmail is also quite easy)
- procmail for sorting mail into your mailboxes

espo · 2006-08-31 09:03:13

i use

1) mutt/procmail/fetchmail/msmtp or
2) mutt/courier-imapd/procmail/msmtp

I take Solution 1) if i leave home and 2) when i'm at home only sync the mailfolder of the server to my desktop and here we go.

Greetings
eSpo

patroclo7 · 2006-08-31 09:56:29

The point about muttng is interesting. Browsing the svn tree of muttng, it seems that no change is newer than 4 months. Thus, it is true that mutt is more actively developed than muttng. The differences between the actual mutt and muttng are really small. In general, muttng community seems to be away for a long lunch (no news in the wiki, the mailing lists include only spam, etc.)

What is surprising is that the snapshots which are packed and updated regularly in the arch unstable repo are always the same snapshot from at least 5 months, thus it seems that those updates in unstable are a bit pointless. Or am I missing something?

PeteMo · 2006-08-31 10:50:35

I don't want to hijack the thread, but does anyone know how to get mutt to generate a clickable index of all pictures attached to an email? Something like running feh -t * in a directory. I've been trying to pull this off for quite awhile with no luck!

phrakture · 2006-08-31 14:33:57

I use muttng over mutt for the sidebar and caching of large mailboxes

mucknert · 2006-08-31 15:35:26

phrakture wrote:

I use muttng over mutt for the sidebar and caching of large mailboxes

If you mean hcache, vanilla mutt can do that too. Although it seems to be broken in 1.5.12.

To add to the topic: I use muttng to access my eMail-Account via IMAP together with msmpt to send mails. This solution is somewhat inferior since it does not do local caching of mails which would be better for no-connection-scenarios but meh.. I am too much of a lazy bum for that. :oops:

zen_guerrilla · 2006-08-31 16:57:05

I use mutt together with offlineimap (http://gopherproject.org/devel/offlineimap) to synchronize my local maildir with my IMAP server. Here's a PKGBUILD for offlineimap:

pkgname=offlineimap
pkgver=4.0.12
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="A powerful IMAP/Maildir synchronization tool"
url="http://gopherproject.org/devel/offlineimap"
license="GPL"
depends=('python')
source=($url/$pkgname_$pkgver.tar.gz)
md5sums=('aa2b67d3462cb1011f4577d7121eb72c')

build() {
  cd $startdir/src/$pkgname
  python setup.py build install --root=$startdir/pkg || return 1
  mkdir -p $startdir/pkg/usr/{man/man1,share/$pkgname}
  install -m 644 offlineimap.1 $startdir/pkg/usr/man/man1/
  install -m 644 offlineimap.conf.minimal 
    $startdir/pkg/usr/share/$pkgname/
}

And then read /usr/share/offlineimap/offlineimap.conf.minimal and the program's man page to create a configuration file.

codemac · 2006-08-31 19:12:19

fetchmail -> procmail -> muttng -> esmtp

http://codemac.net/config/

lanrat · 2006-09-01 10:01:38

If you want to stick to the latest version and have some extra goodies recompile mutt with the patches from the wiki (it's what muttng really is - a selected set of patches).

About console mail clients: there was one very promising application called elmo. It was much easier to setup and did not require additional programs for smtp etc. It also had a lot of great ideas and generally looked better than mutt. Unfortunatelly it's no longer developed (AFAIK). A few screenshots from the archive. Also latest versions of elmo compiled fine under arch but always segfaulted on startup - I was trying to track the bug and help the developer but with no luck.

Also if you want to try something else there are these two interesting console clients: cone and etPan.

patroclo7 · 2006-09-01 16:17:27

I agree about elmo: it was a promising way to reconcile a all-in-one solution with the console advantages. There is no analogue solution around, so it is really a pity to abandon it (however, its development has always been confused and slow, and the realeases far from stable).

Moparx · 2006-09-02 02:49:10

fetchmail / procmail / muttng / msmtp

It's an easy & painless setup

tomfitzyuk · 2006-09-23 23:16:25

getmail + procmail + mutt (with sidebar patch) + msmtp

I just followed the wiki on mutt and don't regret it a bit. Mutt really is a cool client.

patroclo7 · 2006-09-24 09:13:03

I would like to advertise a bit more 'muttprint': if you need to print emails from mutt in a shiny and readable way, just define a macro in .muttrc to use muttprint (you can find the PKGBUILD in the AUR).

Arch Linux

#1 2006-08-30 20:46:56

Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

#2 2006-08-30 21:06:26

Re: Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

#3 2006-08-30 21:48:28

Re: Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

#4 2006-08-31 08:22:51

Re: Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

#5 2006-08-31 08:38:58

Re: Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

#6 2006-08-31 08:46:10

Re: Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

#7 2006-08-31 09:03:13

Re: Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

#8 2006-08-31 09:56:29

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#10 2006-08-31 14:33:57

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#11 2006-08-31 15:35:26

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#12 2006-08-31 16:57:05

Re: Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

#13 2006-08-31 19:12:19

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#14 2006-09-01 10:01:38

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Re: Mutt Mania! Need some advice...

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