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| Viewing file: Select action/file-type: version 1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Abstract “All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” — me, circa 1995 Table of Contents
List of Tables
List of Examples
Table of Contents Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based MIME mail client. Mutt is highly configurable, and is well suited to the mail power user with advanced features like key bindings, keyboard macros, mail threading, regular expression searches and a powerful pattern matching language for selecting groups of messages. The official homepage can be found at http://www.mutt.org/.
To subscribe to one of the following mailing lists, send a message with the
word subscribe in the body to
NoteAll messages posted to mutt-announce are automatically forwarded to mutt-users, so you do not need to be subscribed to both lists. Mutt releases can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/. For a list of mirror sites, please refer to http://www.mutt.org/download.html. For nightly tarballs and version control access, please refer to the Mutt development site.
There are various ways to contribute to the Mutt project. Especially for new users it may be helpful to meet other new and experienced users to chat about Mutt, talk about problems and share tricks. Since translations of Mutt into other languages are highly appreciated, the Mutt developers always look for skilled translators that help improve and continue to maintain stale translations. For contributing code patches for new features and bug fixes, please refer to the developer pages at http://dev.mutt.org/ for more details. This section lists typographical conventions followed throughout this manual. See table Table 1.1, “Typographical conventions for special terms” for typographical conventions for special terms. Table 1.1. Typographical conventions for special terms
Examples are presented as: mutt -v Within command synopsis, curly brackets (“{}”) denote a set of options of which one is mandatory, square brackets (“[]”) denote optional arguments, three dots denote that the argument may be repeated arbitrary times.
Mutt is Copyright © 1996-2009 Michael R. Elkins
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. Table of Contents This section is intended as a brief overview of how to use Mutt. There are many other features which are described elsewhere in the manual. There is even more information available in the Mutt FAQ and various web pages. See the Mutt homepage for more details. The keybindings described in this section are the defaults as distributed. Your local system administrator may have altered the defaults for your site. You can always type “?” in any menu to display the current bindings.
The first thing you need to do is invoke Mutt, simply by typing Mutt is a text-based application which interacts with users through different menus which are mostly line-/entry-based or page-based. A line-based menu is the so-called “index” menu (listing all messages of the currently opened folder) or the “alias” menu (allowing you to select recipients from a list). Examples for page-based menus are the “pager” (showing one message at a time) or the “help” menu listing all available key bindings. The user interface consists of a context sensitive help line at the top, the menu's contents followed by a context sensitive status line and finally the command line. The command line is used to display informational and error messages as well as for prompts and for entering interactive commands. Mutt is configured through variables which, if the user wants to permanently use a non-default value, are written to configuration files. Mutt supports a rich config file syntax to make even complex configuration files readable and commentable. Because Mutt allows for customizing almost all key bindings, there are so-called “functions” which can be executed manually (using the command line) or in macros. Macros allow the user to bind a sequence of commands to a single key or a short key sequence instead of repeating a sequence of actions over and over. Many commands (such as saving or copying a message to another folder) can be applied to a single message or a set of messages (so-called “tagged” messages). To help selecting messages, Mutt provides a rich set of message patterns (such as recipients, sender, body contents, date sent/received, etc.) which can be combined into complex expressions using the boolean and and or operations as well as negating. These patterns can also be used to (for example) search for messages or to limit the index to show only matching messages. Mutt supports a “hook” concept which allows the user to execute arbitrary configuration commands and functions in certain situations such as entering a folder, starting a new message or replying to an existing one. These hooks can be used to highly customize Mutt's behaviour including managing multiple identities, customizing the display for a folder or even implementing auto-archiving based on a per-folder basis and much more.
Besides an interactive mode, Mutt can also be used as a command-line
tool only send messages. It also supports a
The index is the screen that you usually see first when you start Mutt. It gives an overview over your emails in the currently opened mailbox. By default, this is your system mailbox. The information you see in the index is a list of emails, each with its number on the left, its flags (new email, important email, email that has been forwarded or replied to, tagged email, ...), the date when email was sent, its sender, the email size, and the subject. Additionally, the index also shows thread hierarchies: when you reply to an email, and the other person replies back, you can see the other's person email in a "sub-tree" below. This is especially useful for personal email between a group of people or when you've subscribed to mailing lists. The pager is responsible for showing the email content. On the top of the pager you have an overview over the most important email headers like the sender, the recipient, the subject, and much more information. How much information you actually see depends on your configuration, which we'll describe below. Below the headers, you see the email body which usually contains the message. If the email contains any attachments, you will see more information about them below the email body, or, if the attachments are text files, you can view them directly in the pager. To give the user a good overview, it is possible to configure Mutt to show different things in the pager with different colors. Virtually everything that can be described with a regular expression can be colored, e.g. URLs, email addresses or smileys. The file browser is the interface to the local or remote file system. When selecting a mailbox to open, the browser allows custom sorting of items, limiting the items shown by a regular expression and a freely adjustable format of what to display in which way. It also allows for easy navigation through the file system when selecting file(s) to attach to a message, select multiple files to attach and many more. The help screen is meant to offer a quick help to the user. It lists the current configuration of key bindings and their associated commands including a short description, and currently unbound functions that still need to be associated with a key binding (or alternatively, they can be called via the Mutt command prompt). The compose menu features a split screen containing the information which really matter before actually sending a message by mail: who gets the message as what (recipients and who gets what kind of copy). Additionally, users may set security options like deciding whether to sign, encrypt or sign and encrypt a message with/for what keys. Also, it's used to attach messages, to re-edit any attachment including the message itself. The alias menu is used to help users finding the recipients of messages. For users who need to contact many people, there's no need to remember addresses or names completely because it allows for searching, too. The alias mechanism and thus the alias menu also features grouping several addresses by a shorter nickname, the actual alias, so that users don't have to select each single recipient manually. As will be later discussed in detail, Mutt features a good and stable MIME implementation, that is, it supports sending and receiving messages of arbitrary MIME types. The attachment menu displays a message's structure in detail: what content parts are attached to which parent part (which gives a true tree structure), which type is of what type and what size. Single parts may saved, deleted or modified to offer great and easy access to message's internals. The most important navigation keys common to line- or entry-based menus are shown in Table 2.1, “Most common navigation keys in entry-based menus” and in Table 2.2, “Most common navigation keys in page-based menus” for page-based menus. Table 2.1. Most common navigation keys in entry-based menus
Table 2.2. Most common navigation keys in page-based menus
Mutt has a built-in line editor for inputting text, e.g. email addresses or filenames. The keys used to manipulate text input are very similar to those of Emacs. See Table 2.3, “Most common line editor keys” for a full reference of available functions, their default key bindings, and short descriptions. Table 2.3. Most common line editor keys
You can remap the editor functions using the bind command. For example, to make the <Delete> key delete the character in front of the cursor rather than under, you could use: bind editor <delete> backspace
Mutt maintains a history for the built-in editor. The number of items
is controlled by the $history
variable and can be made persistent using an external file specified
using $history_file.
You may cycle through them at an editor prompt by using the
Mutt maintains several distinct history lists, one for each of the following categories:
Mutt automatically filters out consecutively repeated items from the history. It also mimics the behavior of some shells by ignoring items starting with a space. The latter feature can be useful in macros to not clobber the history's valuable entries with unwanted entries. Similar to many other mail clients, there are two modes in which mail is read in Mutt. The first is a list of messages in the mailbox, which is called the “index” menu in Mutt. The second mode is the display of the message contents. This is called the “pager.” The next few sections describe the functions provided in each of these modes. Common keys used to navigate through and manage messages in the index are shown in Table 2.4, “Most common message index keys”. How messages are presented in the index menu can be customized using the $index_format variable. Table 2.4. Most common message index keys
In addition to who sent the message and the subject, a short summary of
the disposition of each message is printed beside the message number.
Zero or more of the “flags” in Table 2.5, “Message status flags”
may appear, some of which can be turned on or off using these functions:
Furthermore, the flags in Table 2.6, “Message recipient flags” reflect who the message is addressed to. They can be customized with the $to_chars variable. Table 2.5. Message status flags
Table 2.6. Message recipient flags
By default, Mutt uses its builtin pager to display the contents of
messages (an external pager such as Table 2.7. Most common pager keys
In addition to key bindings in Table 2.7, “Most common pager keys”,
many of the functions from the index menu are also available in
the pager, such as Also, the internal pager supports a couple other advanced features. For one, it will accept and translate the “standard” nroff sequences for bold and underline. These sequences are a series of either the letter, backspace (“^H”), the letter again for bold or the letter, backspace, “_” for denoting underline. Mutt will attempt to display these in bold and underline respectively if your terminal supports them. If not, you can use the bold and underline color objects to specify a color or mono attribute for them. Additionally, the internal pager supports the ANSI escape sequences for character attributes. Mutt translates them into the correct color and character settings. The sequences Mutt supports are: \e[Ps;Ps;..Ps;m where Ps can be one of the codes shown in Table 2.8, “ANSI escape sequences”. Table 2.8. ANSI escape sequences
Mutt uses these attributes for handling NoteIf you change the colors for your display, for example by changing the color associated with color2 for your xterm, then that color will be used instead of green. NoteNote that the search commands in the pager take regular expressions, which are not quite the same as the more complex patterns used by the search command in the index. This is because patterns are used to select messages by criteria whereas the pager already displays a selected message. So-called “threads” provide a hierarchy of messages where replies are linked to their parent message(s). This organizational form is extremely useful in mailing lists where different parts of the discussion diverge. Mutt displays threads as a tree structure. In Mutt, when a mailbox is sorted by threads, there are a few additional functions available in the index and pager modes as shown in Table 2.10, “Most common thread mode keys”. Table 2.10. Most common thread mode keys
Collapsing a thread displays only the first message
in the thread and hides the others. This is useful when threads
contain so many messages that you can only see a handful of threads on
the screen. See %M in $index_format.
For example, you could use “%?M?(#%03M)&(%4l)?” in $index_format to optionally
display the number of hidden messages if the thread is
collapsed. The Technically, every reply should contain a list of its parent messages in the thread tree, but not all do. In these cases, Mutt groups them by subject which can be controlled using the $strict_threads variable. In addition, the index and pager menus have these interesting functions:
The bindings shown in Table 2.11, “Most common mail sending keys” are available in the index and pager to start a new message. Table 2.11. Most common mail sending keys
Bouncing a message sends the message as-is to the recipient you specify. Forwarding a message allows you to add comments or modify the message you are forwarding. These items are discussed in greater detail in the next section “Forwarding and Bouncing Mail.”
Mutt will then enter the compose menu and prompt you for the
recipients to place on the “To:” header field when you hit When replying, Mutt fills these fields with proper values depending on the reply type. The types of replying supported are:
After getting recipients for new messages, forwards or replies, Mutt will then automatically start your $editor on the message body. If the $edit_headers variable is set, the headers will be at the top of the message in your editor. Any messages you are replying to will be added in sort order to the message, with appropriate $attribution, $indent_string and $post_indent_string. When forwarding a message, if the $mime_forward variable is unset, a copy of the forwarded message will be included. If you have specified a $signature, it will be appended to the message. Once you have finished editing the body of your mail message, you are returned to the compose menu providing the functions shown in Table 2.12, “Most common compose menu keys” to modify, send or postpone the message. Table 2.12. Most common compose menu keys
The compose menu is also used to edit the attachments for a message which can be either files
or other messages. The NoteNote that certain operations like composing a new mail, replying, forwarding, etc. are not permitted when you are in that folder. The %r in $status_format will change to a “A” to indicate that you are in attach-message mode. When editing the header because of $edit_headers being set, there are a several pseudo headers available which will not be included in sent messages but trigger special Mutt behavior. If you specify
as a header, Mutt will pick up filename
just as if you had used the You can also attach files to your message by specifying
where filename is the file to attach and description is an optional string to use as the description of the attached file. Spaces in filenames have to be escaped using backslash (“\”). The file can be removed as well as more added from the compose menu. If you want to use PGP, you can specify
“E” selects encryption, “S” selects signing and “S<id>” selects signing with the given key, setting $pgp_sign_as permanently. The selection can later be changed in the compose menu. When replying to messages, the In-Reply-To: header contains the Message-Id of the message(s) you reply to. If you remove or modify its value, Mutt will not generate a References: field, which allows you to create a new message thread, for example to create a new message to a mailing list without having to enter the mailing list's address. If you have told Mutt to PGP or S/MIME encrypt a message, it will guide you through a key selection process when you try to send the message. Mutt will not ask you any questions about keys which have a certified user ID matching one of the message recipients' mail addresses. However, there may be situations in which there are several keys, weakly certified user ID fields, or where no matching keys can be found.
In these cases, you are dropped into a menu with a list of keys from
which you can select one. When you quit this menu, or Mutt can't
find any matching keys, you are prompted for a user ID. You can, as
usually, abort this prompt using Once you have successfully finished the key selection, the message will be encrypted using the selected public keys when sent out. Most fields of the entries in the key selection menu (see also $pgp_entry_format) have obvious meanings. But some explanations on the capabilities, flags, and validity fields are in order. The flags sequence (“%f”) will expand to one of the flags in Table 2.13, “PGP key menu flags”. Table 2.13. PGP key menu flags
The capabilities field (“%c”) expands to a two-character sequence representing a key's capabilities. The first character gives the key's encryption capabilities: A minus sign (“-”) means that the key cannot be used for encryption. A dot (“.”) means that it's marked as a signature key in one of the user IDs, but may also be used for encryption. The letter “e” indicates that this key can be used for encryption. The second character indicates the key's signing capabilities. Once again, a “-” implies “not for signing”, “.” implies that the key is marked as an encryption key in one of the user-ids, and “s” denotes a key which can be used for signing. Finally, the validity field (“%t”) indicates how well-certified a user-id is. A question mark (“?”) indicates undefined validity, a minus character (“-”) marks an untrusted association, a space character means a partially trusted association, and a plus character (“+”) indicates complete validity.
While for text-mode clients like Mutt it's the best way to assume only a standard 80x25 character cell terminal, it may be desired to let the receiver decide completely how to view a message.
Mutt only supports setting the required
After editing the initial message text and before entering
the compose menu, Mutt properly space-stuffs the message.
Space-stuffing is required by RfC3676 defining
Note
Mutt only supports space-stuffing
for the first two types of lines but not for the third: It is impossible to
safely detect whether a leading All leading spaces are to be removed by receiving clients to restore the original message prior to further processing.
As Mutt provides no additional features to compose Please note that when editing messages from the compose menu several times before really sending a mail, it's up to the user to ensure that the message is properly space-stuffed.
For example, vim provides the
Bouncing and forwarding let you send an existing message to recipients
that you specify. Bouncing a message sends a verbatim copy of a message
to alternative addresses as if they were the message's original
recipients specified in the Bcc header.
Forwarding a message, on the other hand, allows you to modify the message
before it is resent (for example, by adding your own comments). Bouncing
is done using the Forwarding can be done by including the original message in the new message's body (surrounded by indicating lines) or including it as a MIME attachment, depending on the value of the $mime_forward variable. Decoding of attachments, like in the pager, can be controlled by the $forward_decode and $mime_forward_decode variables, respectively. The desired forwarding format may depend on the content, therefore $mime_forward is a quadoption which, for example, can be set to “ask-no”. The inclusion of headers is controlled by the current setting of the $weed variable, unless $mime_forward is set. Editing the message to forward follows the same procedure as sending or replying to a message does.
At times it is desirable to delay sending a message that you have
already begun to compose. When the Once a message is postponed, there are several ways to resume it. From the command line you can use the “-p” option, or if you compose a new message from the index or pager you will be prompted if postponed messages exist. If multiple messages are currently postponed, the postponed menu will pop up and you can select which message you would like to resume. NoteIf you postpone a reply to a message, the reply setting of the message is only updated when you actually finish the message and send it. Also, you must be in the same folder with the message you replied to for the status of the message to be updated. See also the $postpone quad-option. Table of Contents
While the default configuration (or “preferences”) make Mutt
usable right out of the box, it is often desirable to tailor Mutt to
suit your own tastes. When Mutt is first invoked, it will attempt to
read the “system” configuration file (defaults set by your local
system administrator), unless the “-n” command line option is specified. This file is typically
In addition, Mutt supports version specific configuration files that are
parsed instead of the default files as explained above. For instance, if
your system has a An initialization file consists of a series of commands. Each line of the file may contain one or more commands. When multiple commands are used, they must be separated by a semicolon (“;”). The hash mark, or pound sign (“#”), is used as a “comment” character. You can use it to annotate your initialization file. All text after the comment character to the end of the line is ignored. Example 3.2. Commenting configuration files my_hdr X-Disclaimer: Why are you listening to me? # This is a comment Single quotes (“'”) and double quotes (“"”) can be used to quote strings which contain spaces or other special characters. The difference between the two types of quotes is similar to that of many popular shell programs, namely that a single quote is used to specify a literal string (one that is not interpreted for shell variables or quoting with a backslash [see next paragraph]), while double quotes indicate a string for which should be evaluated. For example, backticks are evaluated inside of double quotes, but not for single quotes. “\” quotes the next character, just as in shells such as bash and zsh. For example, if want to put quotes “"” inside of a string, you can use “\” to force the next character to be a literal instead of interpreted character. “\\” means to insert a literal “\” into the line. “\n” and “\r” have their usual C meanings of linefeed and carriage-return, respectively. A “\” at the end of a line can be used to split commands over multiple lines as it “escapes” the line end, provided that the split points don't appear in the middle of command names. Lines are first concatenated before interpretation so that a multi-line can be commented by commenting out the first line only. Example 3.4. Splitting long configuration commands over several lines set status_format="some very \ long value split \ over several lines" It is also possible to substitute the output of a Unix command in an initialization file. This is accomplished by enclosing the command in backticks (``). In Example 3.5, “Using external command's output in configuration files”, the output of the Unix command “uname -a” will be substituted before the line is parsed. Since initialization files are line oriented, only the first line of output from the Unix command will be substituted. Example 3.5. Using external command's output in configuration files my_hdr X-Operating-System: `uname -a` Both environment variables and Mutt variables can be accessed by prepending “$” to the name of the variable. For example,
will cause Mutt to save outgoing messages to a folder named
“sent_on_kremvax” if the environment variable Mutt expands the variable when it is assigned, not when it is used. If the value of a variable on the right-hand side of an assignment changes after the assignment, the variable on the left-hand side will not be affected. The commands understood by Mutt are explained in the next paragraphs. For a complete list, see the command reference. All configuration files are expected to be in the current locale as specified by the $charset variable which doesn't have a default value since it's determined by Mutt at startup. If a configuration file is not encoded in the same character set the $config_charset variable should be used: all lines starting with the next are recoded from $config_charset to $charset. This mechanism should be avoided if possible as it has the following implications:
Usage:
group is used to directly add either addresses or
regular expressions to the specified group or groups. The different
categories of arguments to the group command can be
in any order. The flags
These address groups can also be created implicitly by the
alias, lists,
subscribe and
alternates commands by specifying the
optional Once defined, these address groups can be used in patterns to search for and limit the display to messages matching a group.
ungroup is used to remove addresses or regular
expressions from the specified group or groups. The syntax is similar to
the group command, however the special character
Usage:
It's usually very cumbersome to remember or type out the address of someone you are communicating with. Mutt allows you to create “aliases” which map a short string to a full address. NoteIf you want to create an alias for more than one address, you must separate the addresses with a comma (“,”).
The optional To remove an alias or aliases (“*” means all aliases): alias muttdude me@cs.hmc.edu (Michael Elkins) alias theguys manny, moe, jack
Unlike other mailers, Mutt doesn't require aliases to be defined
in a special file. The alias command can appear anywhere in
a configuration file, as long as this file is sourced. Consequently, you can have multiple alias files, or
you can have all aliases defined in your
On the other hand, the Example 3.7. Configuring external alias files source /usr/local/share/Mutt.aliases source ~/.mail_aliases set alias_file=~/.mail_aliases To use aliases, you merely use the alias at any place in Mutt where Mutt prompts for addresses, such as the To: or Cc: prompt. You can also enter aliases in your editor at the appropriate headers if you have the $edit_headers variable set. In addition, at the various address prompts, you can use the tab character to expand a partial alias to the full alias. If there are multiple matches, Mutt will bring up a menu with the matching aliases. In order to be presented with the full list of aliases, you must hit tab without a partial alias, such as at the beginning of the prompt or after a comma denoting multiple addresses.
In the alias menu, you can select as many aliases as you want with the
Usage:
This command allows you to change the default key bindings (operation invoked when pressing a key). map specifies in which menu the binding belongs. Multiple maps may be specified by separating them with commas (no additional whitespace is allowed). The currently defined maps are:
key is the key (or key sequence) you wish to bind. To specify a control character, use the sequence \Cx, where x is the letter of the control character (for example, to specify control-A use “\Ca”). Note that the case of x as well as \C is ignored, so that \CA, \Ca, \cA and \ca are all equivalent. An alternative form is to specify the key as a three digit octal number prefixed with a “\” (for example \177 is equivalent to \c?). In addition, key may be a symbolic name as shown in Table 3.1, “Symbolic key names”. Table 3.1. Symbolic key names
key does not need to be enclosed in quotes unless it contains a space (“ ”) or semi-colon (“;”).
function specifies which action to take when key is pressed.
For a complete list of functions, see the reference. The special function Usage: The charset-hook command defines an alias for a character set. This is useful to properly display messages which are tagged with a character set name not known to Mutt. The iconv-hook command defines a system-specific name for a character set. This is helpful when your systems character conversion library insists on using strange, system-specific names for character sets. Usage:
It is often desirable to change settings based on which mailbox you are
reading. The folder-hook command provides a method by which you can execute
any configuration command. regexp is a regular expression specifying
in which mailboxes to execute command before loading. If a mailbox
matches multiple folder-hooks, they are executed in the order given in the
NoteIf you use the “!” shortcut for $spoolfile at the beginning of the pattern, you must place it inside of double or single quotes in order to distinguish it from the logical not operator for the expression. NoteSettings are not restored when you leave the mailbox. For example, a command action to perform is to change the sorting method based upon the mailbox being read: folder-hook mutt "set sort=threads" However, the sorting method is not restored to its previous value when reading a different mailbox. To specify a default command, use the pattern “.” before other folder-hooks adjusting a value on a per-folder basis because folder-hooks are evaluated in the order given in the configuration file.
The following example will set the sort variable
to Example 3.8. Setting sort method based on mailbox name folder-hook . "set sort=date-sent" folder-hook mutt "set sort=threads" Usage:
Macros are useful when you would like a single key to perform a series of actions. When you press key in menu menu, Mutt will behave as if you had typed sequence. So if you have a common sequence of commands you type, you can create a macro to execute those commands with a single key or fewer keys. menu is the map which the macro will be bound in. Multiple maps may be specified by separating multiple menu arguments by commas. Whitespace may not be used in between the menu arguments and the commas separating them. key and sequence are expanded by the same rules as the key bindings with some additions. The first is that control characters in sequence can also be specified as ^x. In order to get a caret (“^”) you need to use ^^. Secondly, to specify a certain key such as up or to invoke a function directly, you can use the format <key name> and <function name>. For a listing of key names see the section on key bindings. Functions are listed in the reference. The advantage with using function names directly is that the macros will work regardless of the current key bindings, so they are not dependent on the user having particular key definitions. This makes them more robust and portable, and also facilitates defining of macros in files used by more than one user (e.g., the system Muttrc). Optionally you can specify a descriptive text after sequence, which is shown in the help screens if they contain a description. NoteMacro definitions (if any) listed in the help screen(s), are silently truncated at the screen width, and are not wrapped. Usage:
If your terminal supports color, you can spice up Mutt by creating your own color scheme. To define the color of an object (type of information), you must specify both a foreground color and a background color (it is not possible to only specify one or the other). header and body match regexp in the header/body of a message, index matches pattern (see Section 2, “Patterns: Searching, Limiting and Tagging”) in the message index. object can be one of:
foreground and background can be one of the following:
foreground can optionally be prefixed with the keyword
If your terminal supports it, the special keyword default can be
used as a transparent color. The value brightdefault is also valid.
If Mutt is linked against the S-Lang library, you also need to set
the set COLORFGBG="green;black" export COLORFGBG NoteThe S-Lang library requires you to use the lightgray and brown keywords instead of white and yellow when setting this variable. NoteThe uncolor command can be applied to the index, header and body objects only. It removes entries from the list. You must specify the same pattern specified in the color command for it to be removed. The pattern “*” is a special token which means to clear the color list of all entries. Mutt also recognizes the keywords color0, color1, …, colorN-1 (N being the number of colors supported by your terminal). This is useful when you remap the colors for your display (for example by changing the color associated with color2 for your xterm), since color names may then lose their normal meaning. If your terminal does not support color, it is still possible change the video attributes through the use of the “mono” command. Usage:
For object, see the color command. attribute can be one of the following:
Usage:
Messages often have many header fields added by automatic processing systems, or which may not seem useful to display on the screen. This command allows you to specify header fields which you don't normally want to see in the pager. You do not need to specify the full header field name. For example, “ignore content-” will ignore all header fields that begin with the pattern “content-”. “ignore *” will ignore all headers. To remove a previously added token from the list, use the “unignore” command. The “unignore” command will make Mutt display headers with the given pattern. For example, if you do “ignore x-” it is possible to “unignore x-mailer”. “unignore *” will remove all tokens from the ignore list. Example 3.9. Header weeding # Sven's draconian header weeding ignore * unignore from date subject to cc unignore organization organisation x-mailer: x-newsreader: x-mailing-list: unignore posted-to: Usage:
With the hdr_order command you can specify an order in which Mutt will attempt to present these headers to you when viewing messages. “unhdr_order *” will clear all previous headers from the order list, thus removing the header order effects set by the system-wide startup file. Usage:
With various functions, Mutt will treat messages differently, depending on whether you sent them or whether you received them from someone else. For instance, when replying to a message that you sent to a different party, Mutt will automatically suggest to send the response to the original message's recipients — responding to yourself won't make much sense in many cases. (See $reply_to.) Many users receive e-mail under a number of different addresses. To fully use Mutt's features here, the program must be able to recognize what e-mail addresses you receive mail under. That's the purpose of the alternates command: It takes a list of regular expressions, each of which can identify an address under which you receive e-mail. As addresses are matched using regular expressions and not exact strict comparisons, you should make sure you specify your addresses as precise as possible to avoid mismatches. For example, if you specify: alternates user@example
Mutt will consider “ alternates '^user@example$'
The The unalternates command can be used to write exceptions to alternates patterns. If an address matches something in an alternates command, but you nonetheless do not think it is from you, you can list a more precise pattern under an unalternates command. To remove a regular expression from the alternates list, use the unalternates command with exactly the same regexp. Likewise, if the regexp for an alternates command matches an entry on the unalternates list, that unalternates entry will be removed. If the regexp for unalternates is “*”, all entries on alternates will be removed. Usage:
Mutt has a few nice features for handling mailing lists. In order to take advantage of them, you must
specify which addresses belong to mailing lists, and which mailing
lists you are subscribed to. Mutt also has limited support for
auto-detecting mailing lists: it supports parsing
NoteThe Mail-Followup-To header is a non-standard extension which is not supported by all mail user agents. Adding it is not bullet-proof against receiving personal CCs of list messages. Also note that the generation of the Mail-Followup-To header is controlled by the $followup_to configuration variable since it's common practice on some mailing lists to send Cc upons replies (which is more a group- than a list-reply). More precisely, Mutt maintains lists of patterns for the addresses of known and subscribed mailing lists. Every subscribed mailing list is known. To mark a mailing list as known, use the list command. To mark it as subscribed, use subscribe. You can use regular expressions with both commands. To mark all messages sent to a specific bug report's address on Debian's bug tracking system as list mail, for instance, you could say subscribe [0-9]*.*@bugs.debian.org as it's often, it's sufficient to just give a portion of the list's e-mail address.
Specify as much of the address as you need to to remove ambiguity. For
example, if you've subscribed to the Mutt mailing list, you will receive mail
addressed to
The The “unlists” command is used to remove a token from the list of known and subscribed mailing-lists. Use “unlists *” to remove all tokens. To remove a mailing list from the list of subscribed mailing lists, but keep it on the list of known mailing lists, use unsubscribe. Usage:
This command is used to move read messages from a specified mailbox to a different mailbox automatically when you quit or change folders. pattern is a regular expression specifying the mailbox to treat as a “spool” mailbox and mailbox specifies where mail should be saved when read. Unlike some of the other hook commands, only the first matching pattern is used (it is not possible to save read mail in more than a single mailbox). Usage:
This command specifies folders which can receive mail and which will be checked for new messages periodically. folder can either be a local file or directory (Mbox/Mmdf or Maildir/Mh). If Mutt was built with POP and/or IMAP support, folder can also be a POP/IMAP folder URL. The URL syntax is described in Section 1.2, “URL Syntax”, POP and IMAP are described in Section 3, “POP3 Support” and Section 4, “IMAP Support” respectively. Mutt provides a number of advanced features for handling (possibly many) folders and new mail within them, please refer to Section 9, “Handling multiple folders” for details (including in what situations and how often Mutt checks for new mail). The “unmailboxes” command is used to remove a token from the list of folders which receive mail. Use “unmailboxes *” to remove all tokens. NoteThe folders in the mailboxes command are resolved when the command is executed, so if these names contain shortcut characters (such as “=” and “!”), any variable definition that affects these characters (like $folder and $spoolfile) should be set before the mailboxes command. If none of these shortcuts are used, a local path should be absolute as otherwise Mutt tries to find it relative to the directory from where Mutt was started which may not always be desired.
For Mbox and Mmdf folders, new mail is detected by comparing access and/or
modification times of files: Mutt assumes a folder has new mail if it wasn't
accessed after it was last modified. Utilities like In cases where new mail detection for Mbox or Mmdf folders appears to be unreliable, the $check_mbox_size option can be used to make Mutt track and consult file sizes for new mail detection instead which won't work for size-neutral changes. Usage:
The my_hdr command allows you to create your own header fields which will be added to every message you send and appear in the editor if $edit_headers is set.
For example, if you would like to add an “Organization:” header field to
all of your outgoing messages, you can put the command something like
shown in Example 3.11, “Defining custom headers” in your NoteSpace characters are not allowed between the keyword and the colon (“:”). The standard for electronic mail (RFC2822) says that space is illegal there, so Mutt enforces the rule.
If you would like to add a header field to a single message, you should
either set the $edit_headers variable,
or use the To remove user defined header fields, use the unmy_hdr command. You may specify an asterisk (“*”) to remove all header fields, or the fields to remove. For example, to remove all “To” and “Cc” header fields, you could use: unmy_hdr to cc Usage:
This command is used to override the default mailbox used when saving messages. mailbox will be used as the default if the message matches pattern, see Message Matching in Hooks for information on the exact format. To provide more flexibility and good defaults, Mutt applies the expandos of $index_format to mailbox after it was expanded. Example 3.12. Using %-expandos in save-hook # default: save all to ~/Mail/<author name> save-hook . ~/Mail/%F # save from me@turing.cs.hmc.edu and me@cs.hmc.edu to $folder/elkins save-hook me@(turing\\.)?cs\\.hmc\\.edu$ +elkins # save from aol.com to $folder/spam save-hook aol\\.com$ +spam Also see the fcc-save-hook command. Usage:
This command is used to save outgoing mail in a mailbox other than $record. Mutt searches the initial list of message recipients for the first matching regexp and uses mailbox as the default Fcc: mailbox. If no match is found the message will be saved to $record mailbox. To provide more flexibility and good defaults, Mutt applies the expandos of $index_format to mailbox after it was expanded. See Message Matching in Hooks for information on the exact format of pattern. fcc-hook [@.]aol\\.com$ +spammers ...will save a copy of all messages going to the aol.com domain to the `+spammers' mailbox by default. Also see the fcc-save-hook command. Usage:
This command is a shortcut, equivalent to doing both a fcc-hook and a save-hook with its arguments, including %-expansion on mailbox according to $index_format. Usage:
These commands can be used to execute arbitrary configuration commands based upon recipients of the message. pattern is used to match the message, see Message Matching in Hooks for details. command is executed when pattern matches. reply-hook is matched against the message you are replying to, instead of the message you are sending. send-hook is matched against all messages, both new and replies. Notereply-hooks are matched before the send-hook, regardless of the order specified in the user's configuration file. send2-hook is matched every time a message is changed, either by editing it, or by using the compose menu to change its recipients or subject. send2-hook is executed after send-hook, and can, e.g., be used to set parameters such as the $sendmail variable depending on the message's sender address.
For each type of send-hook or reply-hook, when multiple matches
occur, commands are executed in the order they are specified in the
Example: Another typical use for this command is to change the values of the $attribution, $signature and $locale variables in order to change the language of the attributions and signatures based upon the recipients. Notesend-hook's are only executed once after getting the initial list of recipients. Adding a recipient after replying or editing the message will not cause any send-hook to be executed, similarily if $autoedit is set (as then the initial list of recipients is empty). Also note that my_hdr commands which modify recipient headers, or the message's subject, don't have any effect on the current message when executed from a send-hook. Usage:
This command can be used to execute arbitrary configuration commands
before viewing or formatting a message based upon information about the message.
command is executed if the pattern matches the message to be
displayed. When multiple matches occur, commands are executed in the order
they are specified in the See Message Matching in Hooks for information on the exact format of pattern. Example: message-hook ~A 'set pager=builtin' message-hook '~f freshmeat-news' 'set pager="less \"+/^ subject: .*\""' Usage:
When encrypting messages with PGP/GnuPG or OpenSSL, you may want to associate a certain key with a given e-mail address automatically, either because the recipient's public key can't be deduced from the destination address, or because, for some reasons, you need to override the key Mutt would normally use. The crypt-hook command provides a method by which you can specify the ID of the public key to be used when encrypting messages to a certain recipient. The meaning of keyid is to be taken broadly in this context: You can either put a numerical key ID here, an e-mail address, or even just a real name. Usage:
This command adds the named string to the keyboard buffer. The string may contain control characters, key names and function names like the sequence string in the macro command. You may use it to automatically run a sequence of commands at startup, or when entering certain folders. For example, Example 3.13, “Embedding push in folder-hook” shows how to automatically collapse all threads when entering a folder. Usage:
This command can be used to execute any function. Functions are
listed in the function reference.
“exec Usage:
The score commands adds value to a message's score if pattern
matches it. pattern is a string in the format described in the patterns section (note: For efficiency reasons, patterns
which scan information not available in the index, such as The unscore command removes score entries from the list. You must specify the same pattern specified in the score command for it to be removed. The pattern “*” is a special token which means to clear the list of all score entries. Usage:
Mutt has generalized support for external spam-scoring filters.
By defining your spam patterns with the spam and
Your first step is to define your external filter's spam patterns using
the spam command. pattern should be a regular expression
that matches a header in a mail message. If any message in the mailbox
matches this regular expression, it will receive a “spam tag” or
“spam attribute” (unless it also matches a nospam pattern — see
below.) The appearance of this attribute is entirely up to you, and is
governed by the format parameter. format can be any static
text, but it also can include back-references from the pattern
expression. (A regular expression “back-reference” refers to a
sub-expression contained within parentheses.) To match spam tags, mutt needs the corresponding header information which is always the case for local and POP folders but not for IMAP in the default configuration. Depending on the spam header to be analyzed, $imap_headers may need to be adjusted. If you're using multiple spam filters, a message can have more than one spam-related header. You can define spam patterns for each filter you use. If a message matches two or more of these patterns, and the $spam_separator variable is set to a string, then the message's spam tag will consist of all the format strings joined together, with the value of $spam_separator separating them. For example, suppose one uses DCC, SpamAssassin, and PureMessage, then the configuration might look like in Example 3.14, “Configuring spam detection”. Example 3.14. Configuring spam detection spam "X-DCC-.*-Metrics:.*(....)=many" "90+/DCC-%1" spam "X-Spam-Status: Yes" "90+/SA" spam "X-PerlMX-Spam: .*Probability=([0-9]+)%" "%1/PM" set spam_separator=", "
If then a message is received that DCC registered with “many” hits
under the “Fuz2” checksum, and that PureMessage registered with a
97% probability of being spam, that message's spam tag would read
If the $spam_separator variable is unset, then each spam pattern match supersedes the previous one. Instead of getting joined format strings, you'll get only the last one to match.
The spam tag is what will be displayed in the index when you use
That's a pretty complicated example, and most people's actual environments will have only one spam filter. The simpler your configuration, the more effective Mutt can be, especially when it comes to sorting.
Generally, when you sort by spam tag, Mutt will sort lexically —
that is, by ordering strings alphanumerically. However, if a spam tag
begins with a number, Mutt will sort numerically first, and lexically
only when two numbers are equal in value. (This is like UNIX's
The nospam command can be used to write exceptions to spam patterns. If a header pattern matches something in a spam command, but you nonetheless do not want it to receive a spam tag, you can list a more precise pattern under a nospam command. If the pattern given to nospam is exactly the same as the pattern on an existing spam list entry, the effect will be to remove the entry from the spam list, instead of adding an exception. Likewise, if the pattern for a spam command matches an entry on the nospam list, that nospam entry will be removed. If the pattern for nospam is “*”, all entries on both lists will be removed. This might be the default action if you use spam and nospam in conjunction with a folder-hook.
You can have as many spam or nospam commands as you like.
You can even do your own primitive spam detection within Mutt — for
example, if you consider all mail from spam "^From: .*MAILER-DAEMON" "999" Mutt supports these types of configuration variables:
The following commands are available to manipulate and query variables: Usage:
This command is used to set (and unset) configuration variables. There are four basic types of variables: boolean, number, string and quadoption. boolean variables can be set (true) or unset (false). number variables can be assigned a positive integer value. string variables consist of any number of printable characters and must be enclosed in quotes if they contain spaces or tabs. You may also use the escape sequences “\n” and “\t” for newline and tab, respectively. quadoption variables are used to control whether or not to be prompted for certain actions, or to specify a default action. A value of yes will cause the action to be carried out automatically as if you had answered yes to the question. Similarly, a value of no will cause the action to be carried out as if you had answered “no.” A value of ask-yes will cause a prompt with a default answer of “yes” and ask-no will provide a default answer of “no.”
Prefixing a variable with “no” will unset it. Example:
For boolean variables, you may optionally prefix the variable name with
The toggle command automatically prepends the
The unset command automatically prepends the
Using the set ?allow_8bit The question mark is actually only required for boolean and quadoption variables. The reset command resets all given variables to the compile time defaults (hopefully mentioned in this manual). If you use the command set and prefix the variable with “&” this has the same behavior as the reset command. With the reset command there exists the special variable “all”, which allows you to reset all variables to their system defaults.
Along with the variables listed in the
Configuration variables section, Mutt
supports user-defined variables with names starting
with
The set command either creates a
custom Since user-defined variables are expanded in the same way that environment variables are (except for the shell-escape command and backtick expansion), this feature can be used to make configuration files more readable.
The following example defines and uses the variable Example 3.15. Using user-defined variables for config file readability set my_cfgdir = $HOME/mutt/config source $my_cfgdir/hooks source $my_cfgdir/macros # more source commands...
A custom variable can also be used in macros to backup the current value
of another variable. In the following example, the value of the
$delete is changed temporarily
while its original value is saved as Example 3.16. Using user-defined variables for backing up other config option values macro pager ,x '\ <enter-command>set my_delete=$delete<enter>\ <enter-command>set delete=yes<enter>\ ...\ <enter-command>set delete=$my_delete<enter>'
Since Mutt expands such values already when parsing the configuration
file(s), the value of Example 3.17. Deferring user-defined variable expansion to runtime macro pager <PageDown> "\ <enter-command> set my_old_pager_stop=\$pager_stop pager_stop<Enter>\ <next-page>\ <enter-command> set pager_stop=\$my_old_pager_stop<Enter>\ <enter-command> unset my_old_pager_stop<Enter>"
Note that there is a space
between Usage:
This command allows the inclusion of initialization commands
from other files. For example, I place all of my aliases in
If the filename begins with a tilde (“˜”), it will be expanded to the path of your home directory.
If the filename ends with a vertical bar (“|”), then filename is
considered to be an executable program from which to read input (eg.
Usage: This command allows to test if a feature has been compiled in, before actually executing the command. Item can be either the name of a function, variable, or command. Example:
ifdef imap_keepalive 'source ~/.mutt/imap_setup'
Usage:
This command permits you to flush hooks you have previously defined.
You can either remove all hooks by giving the “*” character as an
argument, or you can remove all hooks of a specific type by saying
something like Format strings are a general concept you'll find in several locations through the Mutt configuration, especially in the $index_format, $pager_format, $status_format, and other related variables. These can be very straightforward, and it's quite possible you already know how to use them.
The most basic format string element is a percent symbol followed
by another character. For example,
Some of the modifiers are borrowed right out of C (though you might
know them from Perl, Python, shell, or another language). These are
the
Mutt adds some other modifiers to format strings. If you use an equals
symbol ( There are two very little-known modifiers that affect the way that an expando is replaced. If there is an underline (“_”) character between any format modifiers (as above) and the expando letter, it will expands in all lower case. And if you use a colon (“:”), it will replace all decimal points with underlines. Depending on the format string variable, some of its sequences can be used to optionally print a string if their value is nonzero. For example, you may only want to see the number of flagged messages if such messages exist, since zero is not particularly meaningful. To optionally print a string based upon one of the above sequences, the following construct is used: %?<sequence_char>?<optional_string>? where sequence_char is an expando, and optional_string is the string you would like printed if sequence_char is nonzero. optional_string may contain other sequences as well as normal text, but you may not nest optional strings. Here is an example illustrating how to optionally print the number of new messages in a mailbox in $status_format: %?n?%n new messages.? You can also switch between two strings using the following construct: %?<sequence_char>?<if_string>&<else_string>? If the value of sequence_char is non-zero, if_string will be expanded, otherwise else_string will be expanded. Any format string ending in a vertical bar (“|”) will be expanded and piped through the first word in the string, using spaces as separator. The string returned will be used for display. If the returned string ends in %, it will be passed through the formatter a second time. This allows the filter to generate a replacement format string including % expandos. All % expandos in a format string are expanded before the script is called so that:
will make Mutt expand
A practical example is the In most format strings, Mutt supports different types of padding using special %-expandos:
Table of Contents
All string patterns in Mutt including those in more complex patterns must be specified using regular expressions (regexp) in the “POSIX extended” syntax (which is more or less the syntax used by egrep and GNU awk). For your convenience, we have included below a brief description of this syntax. The search is case sensitive if the pattern contains at least one upper case letter, and case insensitive otherwise. Note“\” must be quoted if used for a regular expression in an initialization command: “\\”. A regular expression is a pattern that describes a set of strings. Regular expressions are constructed analogously to arithmetic expressions, by using various operators to combine smaller expressions. NoteThe regular expression can be enclosed/delimited by either " or ' which is useful if the regular expression includes a white-space character. See Syntax of Initialization Files for more information on " and ' delimiter processing. To match a literal " or ' you must preface it with \ (backslash). The fundamental building blocks are the regular expressions that match a single character. Most characters, including all letters and digits, are regular expressions that match themselves. Any metacharacter with special meaning may be quoted by preceding it with a backslash. The period “.” matches any single character. The caret “^” and the dollar sign “$” are metacharacters that respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a line. A list of characters enclosed by “[” and “]” matches any single character in that list; if the first character of the list is a caret “^” then it matches any character not in the list. For example, the regular expression [0123456789] matches any single digit. A range of ASCII characters may be specified by giving the first and last characters, separated by a hyphen “-”. Most metacharacters lose their special meaning inside lists. To include a literal “]” place it first in the list. Similarly, to include a literal “^” place it anywhere but first. Finally, to include a literal hyphen “-” place it last. Certain named classes of characters are predefined. Character classes consist of “[:”, a keyword denoting the class, and “:]”. The following classes are defined by the POSIX standard in Table 4.1, “POSIX regular expression character classes” Table 4.1. POSIX regular expression character classes
A character class is only valid in a regular expression inside the brackets of a character list. NoteNote that the brackets in these class names are part of the symbolic names, and must be included in addition to the brackets delimiting the bracket list. For example, [[:digit:]] is equivalent to [0-9]. Two additional special sequences can appear in character lists. These apply to non-ASCII character sets, which can have single symbols (called collating elements) that are represented with more than one character, as well as several characters that are equivalent for collating or sorting purposes:
A regular expression matching a single character may be followed by one of several repetition operators described in Table 4.2, “Regular expression repetition operators”. Table 4.2. Regular expression repetition operators
Two regular expressions may be concatenated; the resulting regular expression matches any string formed by concatenating two substrings that respectively match the concatenated subexpressions. Two regular expressions may be joined by the infix operator “|”; the resulting regular expression matches any string matching either subexpression. Repetition takes precedence over concatenation, which in turn takes precedence over alternation. A whole subexpression may be enclosed in parentheses to override these precedence rules. NoteIf you compile Mutt with the included regular expression engine, the following operators may also be used in regular expressions as described in Table 4.3, “GNU regular expression extensions”. Table 4.3. GNU regular expression extensions
Please note however that these operators are not defined by POSIX, so they may or may not be available in stock libraries on various systems.
Many of Mutt's commands allow you to specify a pattern to match
( Table 4.4. Pattern modifiers
Where EXPR is a regular expression. *) The forms “<[MAX]”, “>[MIN]”, “[MIN]-” and “-[MAX]” are allowed, too. **) The suffixes “K” and “M” are allowed to specify kilobyte and megabyte respectively.
Special attention has to be
payed when using regular expressions inside of patterns. Specifically,
Mutt's parser for these patterns will strip one level of backslash (“\”),
which is normally used for quoting. If it is your intention to use a
backslash in the regular expression, you will need to use two backslashes
instead (“\\”). You can force Mutt to treat EXPR as a simple string
instead of a regular expression by using = instead of ˜ in the
pattern name. For example, Patterns matching lists of addresses (notably c, C, p, P and t) match if there is at least one match in the whole list. If you want to make sure that all elements of that list match, you need to prefix your pattern with “^”. This example matches all mails which only has recipients from Germany. Mutt supports two versions of so called “simple searches”. These are issued if the query entered for searching, limiting and similar operations does not seem to contain a valid pattern modifier (i.e. it does not contain one of these characters: “˜”, “=” or “%”). If the query is supposed to contain one of these special characters, they must be escaped by prepending a backslash (“\”).
The first type is by checking whether the query string equals
a keyword case-insensitively from Table 4.5, “Simple search keywords”:
If that is the case, Mutt will use the shown pattern modifier instead.
If a keyword would conflict with your search keyword, you need to turn
it into a regular expression to avoid matching the keyword table. For
example, if you want to find all messages matching “flag”
(using $simple_search)
but don't want to match flagged messages, simply search for
“ Table 4.5. Simple search keywords
The second type of simple search is to build a complex search pattern using $simple_search as a template. Mutt will insert your query properly quoted and search for the composed complex query. Logical AND is performed by specifying more than one criterion. For example: ~t mutt ~f elkins would select messages which contain the word “mutt” in the list of recipients and that have the word “elkins” in the “From” header field. Mutt also recognizes the following operators to create more complex search patterns:
Here is an example illustrating a complex search pattern. This pattern will select all messages which do not contain “mutt” in the “To” or “Cc” field and which are from “elkins”. Here is an example using white space in the regular expression (note the ' and " delimiters). For this to match, the mail's subject must match the “^Junk +From +Me$” and it must be from either “Jim +Somebody” or “Ed +SomeoneElse”:
'~s "^Junk +From +Me$" ~f ("Jim +Somebody"|"Ed +SomeoneElse")'
Note
If a regular expression contains parenthesis, or a vertical bar
("|"), you must enclose the expression in double or single quotes since
those characters are also used to separate different parts of Mutt's
pattern language. For example: Mutt supports two types of dates, absolute and relative. Dates must be in DD/MM/YY format (month and year are optional, defaulting to the current month and year). An example of a valid range of dates is: Limit to messages matching: ~d 20/1/95-31/10 If you omit the minimum (first) date, and just specify “-DD/MM/YY”, all messages before the given date will be selected. If you omit the maximum (second) date, and specify “DD/MM/YY-”, all messages after the given date will be selected. If you specify a single date with no dash (“-”), only messages sent on the given date will be selected. You can add error margins to absolute dates. An error margin is a sign (+ or -), followed by a digit, followed by one of the units in Table 4.6, “Date units”. As a special case, you can replace the sign by a “*” character, which is equivalent to giving identical plus and minus error margins. Example: To select any messages two weeks around January 15, 2001, you'd use the following pattern: Limit to messages matching: ~d 15/1/2001*2w This type of date is relative to the current date, and may be specified as:
offset is specified as a positive number with one of the units from Table 4.6, “Date units”. Example: to select messages less than 1 month old, you would use Limit to messages matching: ~d <1m Note
All dates used when searching are relative to the
local time zone, so unless you change the setting of your $index_format to include a
Sometimes it is desirable to perform an operation on a group of
messages all at once rather than one at a time. An example might be
to save messages to a mailing list to a separate folder, or to
delete all messages with a given subject. To tag all messages
matching a pattern, use the Once you have tagged the desired messages, you can use the “tag-prefix” operator, which is the “;” (semicolon) key by default. When the “tag-prefix” operator is used, the next operation will be applied to all tagged messages if that operation can be used in that manner. If the $auto_tag variable is set, the next operation applies to the tagged messages automatically, without requiring the “tag-prefix”.
In macros or push commands,
you can use the A hook is a concept found in many other programs which allows you to execute arbitrary commands before performing some operation. For example, you may wish to tailor your configuration based upon which mailbox you are reading, or to whom you are sending mail. In the Mutt world, a hook consists of a regular expression or pattern along with a configuration option/command. See: for specific details on each type of hook available. NoteIf a hook changes configuration settings, these changes remain effective until the end of the current Mutt session. As this is generally not desired, a “default” hook needs to be added before all other hooks of that type to restore configuration defaults. Example 4.3. Specifying a “default” hook send-hook . 'unmy_hdr From:' send-hook ~C'^b@b\.b$' my_hdr from: c@c.c
In Example 4.3, “Specifying a “default” hook”, by default the value of
$from
and $realname
is not overridden. When sending messages either To: or Cc:
to Hooks that act upon messages (message-hook, reply-hook, send-hook, send2-hook, save-hook, fcc-hook) are evaluated in a slightly different manner. For the other types of hooks, a regular expression is sufficient. But in dealing with messages a finer grain of control is needed for matching since for different purposes you want to match different criteria. Mutt allows the use of the search pattern language for matching messages in hook commands. This works in exactly the same way as it would when limiting or searching the mailbox, except that you are restricted to those operators which match information Mutt extracts from the header of the message (i.e., from, to, cc, date, subject, etc.). For example, if you wanted to set your return address based upon sending mail to a specific address, you could do something like: send-hook '~t ^me@cs\.hmc\.edu$' 'my_hdr From: Mutt User <user@host>' which would execute the given command when sending mail to me@cs.hmc.edu. However, it is not required that you write the pattern to match using the full searching language. You can still specify a simple regular expression like the other hooks, in which case Mutt will translate your pattern into the full language, using the translation specified by the $default_hook variable. The pattern is translated at the time the hook is declared, so the value of $default_hook that is in effect at that time will be used. Mutt supports connecting to external directory databases such as LDAP, ph/qi, bbdb, or NIS through a wrapper script which connects to Mutt using a simple interface. Using the $query_command variable, you specify the wrapper command to use. For example: set query_command = "mutt_ldap_query.pl '%s'" The wrapper script should accept the query on the command-line. It should return a one line message, then each matching response on a single line, each line containing a tab separated address then name then some other optional information. On error, or if there are no matching addresses, return a non-zero exit code and a one line error message. An example multiple response output: Searching database ... 20 entries ... 3 matching: me@cs.hmc.edu Michael Elkins mutt dude blong@fiction.net Brandon Long mutt and more roessler@does-not-exist.org Thomas Roessler mutt pgp
There are two mechanisms for accessing the query function of Mutt. One
is to do a query from the index menu using the
The other mechanism for accessing the query function is for address
completion, similar to the alias completion. In any prompt for address
entry, you can use the Mutt supports reading and writing of four different local mailbox formats: mbox, MMDF, MH and Maildir. The mailbox type is autodetected, so there is no need to use a flag for different mailbox types. When creating new mailboxes, Mutt uses the default specified with the $mbox_type variable. A short description of the formats follows. mbox. This is a widely used mailbox format for UNIX. All messages are stored in a single file. Each message has a line of the form: From me@cs.hmc.edu Fri, 11 Apr 1997 11:44:56 PST to denote the start of a new message (this is often referred to as the “From_” line). The mbox format requires mailbox locking, is prone to mailbox corruption with concurrently writing clients or misinterpreted From_ lines. Depending on the environment, new mail detection can be unreliable. Mbox folders are fast to open and easy to archive. MMDF. This is a variant of the mbox format. Each message is surrounded by lines containing “^A^A^A^A” (four control-A's). The same problems as for mbox apply (also with finding the right message separator as four control-A's may appear in message bodies).
MH. A radical departure from mbox and MMDF, a mailbox
consists of a directory and each message is stored in a separate file.
The filename indicates the message number (however, this is may not
correspond to the message number Mutt displays). Deleted messages are
renamed with a comma (“,”) prepended to the filename. Mutt
detects this type of mailbox by looking for either Maildir. The newest of the mailbox formats, used by the Qmail MTA (a replacement for sendmail). Similar to MH, except that it adds three subdirectories of the mailbox: tmp, new and cur. Filenames for the messages are chosen in such a way they are unique, even when two programs are writing the mailbox over NFS, which means that no file locking is needed and corruption is very unlikely. Maildir maybe slower to open without caching in Mutt, it too is not very disk-space efficient depending on the environment. Since no additional files are used for metadata (which is embedded in the message filenames) and Maildir is locking-free, it's easy to sync across different machines using file-level synchronization tools. There are a number of built in shortcuts which refer to specific mailboxes. These shortcuts can be used anywhere you are prompted for a file or mailbox path or in path-related configuration variables. Note that these only work at the beginning of a string.
For example, to store a copy of outgoing messages in the folder they were composed in, a folder-hook can be used to set $record: folder-hook . 'set record=^'
Mutt has a few configuration options that make dealing with large
amounts of mail easier. The first thing you must do is to let Mutt
know what addresses you consider to be mailing lists (technically
this does not have to be a mailing list, but that is what it is most
often used for), and what lists you are subscribed to. This is
accomplished through the use of the lists and subscribe commands in your Now that Mutt knows what your mailing lists are, it can do several things, the first of which is the ability to show the name of a list through which you received a message (i.e., of a subscribed list) in the index menu display. This is useful to distinguish between personal and list mail in the same mailbox. In the $index_format variable, the expando “%L” will print the string “To <list>” when “list” appears in the “To” field, and “Cc <list>” when it appears in the “Cc” field (otherwise it prints the name of the author).
Often times the “To” and “Cc” fields in mailing list messages
tend to get quite large. Most people do not bother to remove the
author of the message they reply to from the list, resulting in
two or more copies being sent to that person. The
Mutt also supports the
Conversely, when group-replying or list-replying to a message which
has a Note
When header editing is enabled, you can create a
The other method some mailing list admins use is to generate a “Reply-To” field which points back to the mailing list address rather than the author of the message. This can create problems when trying to reply directly to the author in private, since most mail clients will automatically reply to the address given in the “Reply-To” field. Mutt uses the $reply_to variable to help decide which address to use. If set to ask-yes or ask-no, you will be prompted as to whether or not you would like to use the address given in the “Reply-To” field, or reply directly to the address given in the “From” field. When set to yes, the “Reply-To” field will be used when present. The “X-Label:” header field can be used to further identify mailing lists or list subject matter (or just to annotate messages individually). The $index_format variable's “%y” and “%Y” expandos can be used to expand “X-Label:” fields in the index, and Mutt's pattern-matcher can match regular expressions to “X-Label:” fields with the “˜y” selector. “X-Label:” is not a standard message header field, but it can easily be inserted by procmail and other mail filtering agents. Lastly, Mutt has the ability to sort the mailbox into threads. A thread is a group of messages which all relate to the same subject. This is usually organized into a tree-like structure where a message and all of its replies are represented graphically. If you've ever used a threaded news client, this is the same concept. It makes dealing with large volume mailing lists easier because you can easily delete uninteresting threads and quickly find topics of value. Mutt supports setups with multiple folders, allowing all of them to be monitored for new mail (see Section 14, “Monitoring Incoming Mail” for details). When in the index menu and being idle (also see $timeout), Mutt periodically checks for new mail in all folders which have been configured via the mailboxes command. The interval depends on the folder type: for local/IMAP folders it consults $mail_check and $pop_checkinterval for POP folders.
Outside the index menu the directory browser supports checking
for new mail using the
For the pager, index and directory browser menus, Mutt contains the
For the index, by default Mutt displays the number of mailboxes with new mail in the status bar, please refer to the $status_format variable for details. When changing folders, Mutt fills the prompt with the first folder from the mailboxes list containing new mail (if any), pressing space will cycle through folders with new mail. Mutt has the ability to dynamically restructure threads that are broken either by misconfigured software or bad behavior from some correspondents. This allows to clean your mailboxes from these annoyances which make it hard to follow a discussion.
Some mailers tend to “forget” to correctly set the “In-Reply-To:” and
“References:” headers when replying to a message. This results in broken
discussions because Mutt has not enough information to guess the correct
threading.
You can fix this by tagging the reply, then moving to the parent message
and using the
You can also connect multiple children at once, tagging them and using the
On mailing lists, some people are in the bad habit of starting a new
discussion by hitting “reply” to any message from the list and changing
the subject to a totally unrelated one.
You can fix such threads by using the RFC1894 defines a set of MIME content types for relaying information about the status of electronic mail messages. These can be thought of as “return receipts.” To support DSN, there are two variables. $dsn_notify is used to request receipts for different results (such as failed message, message delivered, etc.). $dsn_return requests how much of your message should be returned with the receipt (headers or full message). When using $sendmail for mail delivery, you need to use either Berkeley sendmail 8.8.x (or greater) a MTA supporting DSN command line options compatible to Sendmail: The -N and -R options can be used by the mail client to make requests as to what type of status messages should be returned. Please consider your MTA documentation whether DSN is supported. For SMTP delivery using $smtp_url, it depends on the capabilities announced by the server whether Mutt will attempt to request DSN or not. If a message contains URLs, it is efficient to get a menu with all the URLs and start a WWW browser on one of them. This functionality is provided by the external urlview program which can be retrieved at ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/contrib/ and the configuration commands: macro index \cb |urlview\n macro pager \cb |urlview\n This section documents various features that fit nowhere else.
If Mutt was compiled with compressed folders support (by running the configure script with the --enable-compressed flag), Mutt can open folders stored in an arbitrary format, provided that the user has a script to convert from/to this format to one of the accepted. The most common use is to open compressed archived folders e.g. with gzip. In addition, the user can provide a script that gets a folder in an accepted format and appends its context to the folder in the user-defined format, which may be faster than converting the entire folder to the accepted format, appending to it and converting back to the user-defined format. There are three hooks defined (open-hook, close-hook and append-hook) which define commands to uncompress and compress a folder and to append messages to an existing compressed folder respectively. For example: open-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -cd %f > %t" close-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t > %f" append-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t >> %f" You do not have to specify all of the commands. If you omit append-hook, the folder will be open and closed again each time you will add to it. If you omit close-hook (or give empty command) , the folder will be open in the mode. If you specify append-hook though you'll be able to append to the folder. Note that Mutt will only try to use hooks if the file is not in one of the accepted formats. In particular, if the file is empty, mutt supposes it is not compressed. This is important because it allows the use of programs that do not have well defined extensions. Just use "." as a regexp. But this may be surprising if your compressing script produces empty files. In this situation, unset $save_empty, so that the compressed file will be removed if you delete all of the messages.
Usage: open-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -cd %f > %t" If the command is empty, this operation is disabled for this file type.
Usage: close-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t > %f" If the command is empty, this operation is disabled for this file type, and the file can only be open in the read-only mode. close-hook is not called when you exit from the folder if the folder was not changed.
Usage: append-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t >> %f" When append-hook is used, the folder is not opened, which saves time, but this means that we can not find out what the folder type is. Thus the default ($mbox_type) type is always supposed (i.e. this is the format used for the temporary folder). If the file does not exist when you save to it, close-hook is called, and not append-hook. append-hook is only for appending to existing folders. If the command is empty, this operation is disabled for this file type. In this case, the folder will be open and closed again (using open-hook and close-hook respectively) each time you will add to it. The compressed folders support can also be used to handle encrypted folders. If you want to encrypt a folder with PGP, you may want to use the following hooks: open-hook \\.pgp$ "pgp -f < %f > %t" close-hook \\.pgp$ "pgp -fe YourPgpUserIdOrKeyId < %t > %f" Please note, that PGP does not support appending to an encrypted folder, so there is no append-hook defined. If you are using GnuPG instead of PGP, you may use the following hooks instead: open-hook \\.gpg$ "gpg --decrypt < %f > %t" close-hook \\.gpg$ "gpg --encrypt --recipient YourGpgUserIdOrKeyId < %t > %f" Note: the folder is temporary stored decrypted in the /tmp directory, where it can be read by your system administrator. So think about the security aspects of this. Table of Contents
Quite a bit of effort has been made to make Mutt the premier text-mode
MIME MUA. Every effort has been made to provide the functionality that
the discerning MIME user requires, and the conformance to the standards
wherever possible. When configuring Mutt for MIME, there are two extra
types of configuration files which Mutt uses. One is the
There are three areas/menus in Mutt which deal with MIME, they are the pager (while viewing a message), the attachment menu and the compose menu.
When you select a message from the index and view it in the pager, Mutt
decodes the message to a text representation. Mutt internally supports
a number of MIME types, including Mutt will denote attachments with a couple lines describing them. These lines are of the form: [-- Attachment #1: Description --] [-- Type: text/plain, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 10000 --]
Where the If Mutt cannot deal with a MIME type, it will display a message like: [-- image/gif is unsupported (use 'v' to view this part) --]
The default binding for
Finally, you can apply the usual message-related functions (like
See the help on the attachment menu for more information. The compose menu is the menu you see before you send a message. It allows you to edit the recipient list, the subject, and other aspects of your message. It also contains a list of the attachments of your message, including the main body. From this menu, you can print, copy, filter, pipe, edit, compose, review, and rename an attachment or a list of tagged attachments. You can also modifying the attachment information, notably the type, encoding and description. Attachments appear as follows: - 1 [text/plain, 7bit, 1K] /tmp/mutt-euler-8082-0 <no description> 2 [applica/x-gunzip, base64, 422K] ~/src/mutt-0.85.tar.gz <no description>
The '-' denotes that Mutt will delete the file after sending (or
postponing, or canceling) the message. It can be toggled with the
When you add an attachment to your mail message, Mutt searches your
personal
The application/postscript ps eps application/pgp pgp audio/x-aiff aif aifc aiff
A sample
If Mutt can not determine the mime type by the extension of the file you
attach, it will look at the file. If the file is free of binary
information, Mutt will assume that the file is plain text, and mark it
as Mutt supports RFC 1524 MIME Configuration, in particular the Unix specific format specified in Appendix A of RFC 1524. This file format is commonly referred to as the mailcap format. Many MIME compliant programs utilize the mailcap format, allowing you to specify handling for all MIME types in one place for all programs. Programs known to use this format include Firefox, lynx and metamail. In order to handle various MIME types that Mutt can not handle internally, Mutt parses a series of external configuration files to find an external handler. The default search string for these files is a colon delimited list containing the following files:
where The default search path can be obtained by running the following command: mutt -nF /dev/null -Q mailcap_path
In particular, the metamail distribution will install a mailcap file,
usually as A mailcap file consists of a series of lines which are comments, blank, or definitions. A comment line consists of a # character followed by anything you want. A blank line is blank. A definition line consists of a content type, a view command, and any number of optional fields. Each field of a definition line is divided by a semicolon ';' character.
The content type is specified in the MIME standard type/subtype method.
For example,
The view command is a Unix command for viewing the type specified. There are two different types of commands supported. The default is to send the body of the MIME message to the command on stdin. You can change this behavior by using %s as a parameter to your view command. This will cause Mutt to save the body of the MIME message to a temporary file, and then call the view command with the %s replaced by the name of the temporary file. In both cases, Mutt will turn over the terminal to the view program until the program quits, at which time Mutt will remove the temporary file if it exists. So, in the simplest form, you can send a text/plain message to the external pager more on stdin: text/plain; more Or, you could send the message as a file: text/plain; more %s Perhaps you would like to use lynx to interactively view a text/html message: text/html; lynx %s In this case, lynx does not support viewing a file from stdin, so you must use the %s syntax. NoteSome older versions of lynx contain a bug where they will check the mailcap file for a viewer for text/html. They will find the line which calls lynx, and run it. This causes lynx to continuously spawn itself to view the object. On the other hand, maybe you don't want to use lynx interactively, you just want to have it convert the text/html to text/plain, then you can use: text/html; lynx -dump %s | more Perhaps you wish to use lynx to view text/html files, and a pager on all other text formats, then you would use the following: text/html; lynx %s text/*; more This is the simplest form of a mailcap file. The interpretation of shell meta-characters embedded in MIME parameters can lead to security problems in general. Mutt tries to quote parameters in expansion of %s syntaxes properly, and avoids risky characters by substituting them, see the $mailcap_sanitize variable. Although Mutt's procedures to invoke programs with mailcap seem to be safe, there are other applications parsing mailcap, maybe taking less care of it. Therefore you should pay attention to the following rules: Keep the %-expandos away from shell quoting. Don't quote them with single or double quotes. Mutt does this for you, the right way, as should any other program which interprets mailcap. Don't put them into backtick expansions. Be highly careful with eval statements, and avoid them if possible at all. Trying to fix broken behavior with quotes introduces new leaks - there is no alternative to correct quoting in the first place.
If you have to use the %-expandos' values in context where you need
quoting or backtick expansions, put that value into a shell variable
and reference the shell variable where necessary, as in the following
example (using
text/test-mailcap-bug; cat %s; copiousoutput; test=charset=%{charset} \
&& test "`echo $charset | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`" != iso-8859-1
In addition to the required content-type and view command fields, you can add semi-colon ';' separated fields to set flags and other options. Mutt recognizes the following optional fields:
When searching for an entry in the mailcap file, Mutt will search for
the most useful entry for its purpose. For instance, if you are
attempting to print an
image/*; xv %s
image/gif; ; print= anytopnm %s | pnmtops | lpr; \
nametemplate=%s.gif
Mutt will skip the In addition, you can use this with auto_view to denote two commands for viewing an attachment, one to be viewed automatically, the other to be viewed interactively from the attachment menu. In addition, you can then use the test feature to determine which viewer to use interactively depending on your environment. text/html; firefox -remote 'openURL(%s)' ; test=RunningX text/html; lynx %s; nametemplate=%s.html text/html; lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput For auto_view, Mutt will choose the third entry because of the copiousoutput tag. For interactive viewing, Mutt will run the program RunningX to determine if it should use the first entry. If the program returns non-zero, Mutt will use the second entry for interactive viewing.
The various commands defined in the mailcap files are passed to the
Mutt does not currently support the %F and %n keywords specified in RFC 1524. The main purpose of these parameters is for multipart messages, which is handled internally by Mutt. This mailcap file is fairly simple and standard: # I'm always running X :) video/*; xanim %s > /dev/null image/*; xv %s > /dev/null # I'm always running firefox (if my computer had more memory, maybe) text/html; firefox -remote 'openURL(%s)' This mailcap file shows quite a number of examples:
# Use xanim to view all videos Xanim produces a header on startup,
# send that to /dev/null so I don't see it
video/*; xanim %s > /dev/null
# Send html to a running firefox by remote
text/html; firefox -remote 'openURL(%s)'; test=RunningFirefox
# If I'm not running firefox but I am running X, start firefox on the
# object
text/html; firefox %s; test=RunningX
# Else use lynx to view it as text
text/html; lynx %s
# This version would convert the text/html to text/plain
text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput
# I use enscript to print text in two columns to a page
text/*; more %s; print=enscript -2Gr %s
# Firefox adds a flag to tell itself to view jpegs internally
image/jpeg;xv %s; x-mozilla-flags=internal
# Use xv to view images if I'm running X
# In addition, this uses the \ to extend the line and set my editor
# for images
image/*;xv %s; test=RunningX; \
edit=xpaint %s
# Convert images to text using the netpbm tools
image/*; (anytopnm %s | pnmscale -xysize 80 46 | ppmtopgm | pgmtopbm |
pbmtoascii -1x2 ) 2>&1 ; copiousoutput
# Send excel spreadsheets to my NT box
application/ms-excel; open.pl %s
Usage:
In addition to explicitly telling Mutt to view an attachment with the MIME viewer defined in the mailcap file, Mutt has support for automatically viewing MIME attachments while in the pager.
To work, you must define a viewer in the mailcap file which uses the
You then use the auto_view auto_view text/html application/x-gunzip \ application/postscript image/gif application/x-tar-gz Mutt could use the following mailcap entries to automatically view attachments of these types.
text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
image/*; anytopnm %s | pnmscale -xsize 80 -ysize 50 | ppmtopgm | \
pgmtopbm | pbmtoascii ; copiousoutput
application/x-gunzip; gzcat; copiousoutput
application/x-tar-gz; gunzip -c %s | tar -tf - ; copiousoutput
application/postscript; ps2ascii %s; copiousoutput
unauto_view can be used to remove previous entries from the autoview list. This can be used with message-hook to autoview messages based on size, etc. “unauto_view *” will remove all previous entries.
Mutt has some heuristics for determining which attachment of a
alternative_order text/enriched text/plain text application/postscript image/* Next, Mutt will check if any of the types have a defined auto_view, and use that. Failing that, Mutt will look for any text type. As a last attempt, Mutt will look for any type it knows how to handle. To remove a MIME type from the alternative_order list, use the unalternative_order command. If you ever lose track of attachments in your mailboxes, Mutt's attachment-counting and -searching support might be for you. You can make your message index display the number of qualifying attachments in each message, or search for messages by attachment count. You also can configure what kinds of attachments qualify for this feature with the attachments and unattachments commands. In order to provide this information, Mutt needs to fully MIME-parse all messages affected first. This can slow down operation especially for remote mail folders such as IMAP because all messages have to be downloaded first regardless whether the user really wants to view them or not. The syntax is:
disposition is the attachment's Content-Disposition type — either
Disposition is prefixed by either a + symbol or a - symbol. If it's a +, you're saying that you want to allow this disposition and MIME type to qualify. If it's a -, you're saying that this disposition and MIME type is an exception to previous + rules. There are examples below of how this is useful.
mime-type is, unsurprisingly, the MIME type of the attachment you want
to affect. A MIME type is always of the format The MIME types you give to the attachments directive are a kind of pattern. When you use the attachments directive, the patterns you specify are added to a list. When you use unattachments, the pattern is removed from the list. The patterns are not expanded and matched to specific MIME types at this time — they're just text in a list. They're only matched when actually evaluating a message. Some examples might help to illustrate. The examples that are not commented out define the default configuration of the lists. Example 5.1. Attachment counting ## Removing a pattern from a list removes that pattern literally. It ## does not remove any type matching the pattern. ## ## attachments +A */.* ## attachments +A image/jpeg ## unattachments +A */.* ## ## This leaves "attached" image/jpeg files on the allowed attachments ## list. It does not remove all items, as you might expect, because the ## second */.* is not a matching expression at this time. ## ## Remember: "unattachments" only undoes what "attachments" has done! ## It does not trigger any matching on actual messages. ## Qualify any MIME part with an "attachment" disposition, EXCEPT for ## text/x-vcard and application/pgp parts. (PGP parts are already known ## to mutt, and can be searched for with ~g, ~G, and ~k.) ## ## I've added x-pkcs7 to this, since it functions (for S/MIME) ## analogously to PGP signature attachments. S/MIME isn't supported ## in a stock mutt build, but we can still treat it specially here. ## attachments +A */.* attachments -A text/x-vcard application/pgp.* attachments -A application/x-pkcs7-.* ## Discount all MIME parts with an "inline" disposition, unless they're ## text/plain. (Why inline a text/plain part unless it's external to the ## message flow?) ## attachments +I text/plain ## These two lines make Mutt qualify MIME containers. (So, for example, ## a message/rfc822 forward will count as an attachment.) The first ## line is unnecessary if you already have "attach-allow */.*", of ## course. These are off by default! The MIME elements contained ## within a message/* or multipart/* are still examined, even if the ## containers themselves don't qualify. ## #attachments +A message/.* multipart/.* #attachments +I message/.* multipart/.* ## You probably don't really care to know about deleted attachments. attachments -A message/external-body attachments -I message/external-body Entering the command “attachments ?” as a command will list your current settings in Muttrc format, so that it can be pasted elsewhere. Usage:
Mutt's mime_lookup list specifies a list of mime-types that should not
be treated according to their mailcap entry. This option is designed to
deal with binary types such as mime_lookup application/octet-stream application/X-Lotus-Manuscript
In addition, the Table of Contents Mutt supports several of optional features which can be enabled or disabled at compile-time by giving the configure script certain arguments. These are listed in the “Optional features” section of the configure --help output.
Which features are enabled or disabled can later be determined from the
output of -USE_SSL_OPENSSL +USE_SSL_GNUTLS
Mutt optionally supports the IMAP, POP3 and SMTP protocols which require
to access servers using URLs. The canonical syntax for specifying URLs
in Mutt is (an item enclosed in proto[s]://[username[:password]@]server[:port]/[path]
proto is the communication protocol:
Since all protocols supported by Mutt support/require authentication, login credentials may be specified in the URL. This has the advantage that multiple IMAP, POP3 or SMTP servers may be specified (which isn't possible using, for example, $imap_user). The username may contain the “@” symbol being used by many mail systems as part of the login name. A password can be given, too but is not recommended if the URL is specified in a configuration file on disk.
If no port number is given, Mutt will use the system's default for the
given protocol (usually consulting The optional path is only relevant for IMAP. If Mutt is compiled with IMAP, POP3 and/or SMTP support, it can also be compiled with support for SSL or TLS using either OpenSSL or GnuTLS ( by running the configure script with the --enable-ssl=... option for OpenSSL or --enable-gnutls=... for GnuTLS). Mutt can then attempt to encrypt communication with remote servers if these protocols are suffixed with “s” for “secure communication”. If Mutt is compiled with POP3 support (by running the configure script with the --enable-pop flag), it has the ability to work with mailboxes located on a remote POP3 server and fetch mail for local browsing.
Remote POP3 servers can be accessed using URLs with the Polling for new mail is more expensive over POP3 than locally. For this reason the frequency at which Mutt will check for mail remotely can be controlled by the $pop_checkinterval variable, which defaults to every 60 seconds. POP is read-only which doesn't allow for some features like editing messages or changing flags. However, using Section 7.1, “Header Caching” and Section 7.2, “Body Caching” Mutt simulates the new/old/read flags as well as flagged and replied. Mutt applies some logic on top of remote messages but cannot change them so that modifications of flags are lost when messages are downloaded from the POP server (either by Mutt or other tools).
Another way to access your POP3 mail is the Note
If you only need to fetch all messages to a
local mailbox you should consider using a specialized program, such as
If Mutt was compiled with IMAP support (by running the configure script with the --enable-imap flag), it has the ability to work with folders located on a remote IMAP server.
You can access the remote inbox by selecting the folder by its URL
(see Section 1.2, “URL Syntax” for details) using the
Note that not all servers use “/” as the hierarchy separator. Mutt should correctly notice which separator is being used by the server and convert paths accordingly. When browsing folders on an IMAP server, you can toggle whether to look at only the folders you are subscribed to, or all folders with the toggle-subscribed command. See also the $imap_list_subscribed variable. Polling for new mail on an IMAP server can cause noticeable delays. So, you'll want to carefully tune the $mail_check and $timeout variables. Reasonable values are: set mail_check=90 set timeout=15 with relatively good results even over slow modem lines. NoteNote that if you are using mbox as the mail store on UW servers prior to v12.250, the server has been reported to disconnect a client if another client selects the same folder. As of version 1.2, Mutt supports browsing mailboxes on an IMAP server. This is mostly the same as the local file browser, with the following differences:
Mutt supports four authentication methods with IMAP servers: SASL, GSSAPI, CRAM-MD5, and LOGIN (there is a patch by Grant Edwards to add NTLM authentication for you poor exchange users out there, but it has yet to be integrated into the main tree). There is also support for the pseudo-protocol ANONYMOUS, which allows you to log in to a public IMAP server without having an account. To use ANONYMOUS, simply make your username blank or “anonymous”. SASL is a special super-authenticator, which selects among several protocols (including GSSAPI, CRAM-MD5, ANONYMOUS, and DIGEST-MD5) the most secure method available on your host and the server. Using some of these methods (including DIGEST-MD5 and possibly GSSAPI), your entire session will be encrypted and invisible to those teeming network snoops. It is the best option if you have it. To use it, you must have the Cyrus SASL library installed on your system and compile Mutt with the --with-sasl flag. Mutt will try whichever methods are compiled in and available on the server, in the following order: SASL, ANONYMOUS, GSSAPI, CRAM-MD5, LOGIN. There are a few variables which control authentication:
Besides supporting traditional mail delivery through a
sendmail-compatible program, Mutt supports delivery through SMTP if it
was configured and built with If the configuration variable $smtp_url is set, Mutt will contact the given SMTP server to deliver messages; if it is unset, Mutt will use the program specified by $sendmail. For details on the URL syntax, please see Section 1.2, “URL Syntax”.
The built-in SMTP support supports encryption (the Usage:
If you happen to have accounts on multiple IMAP, POP and/or SMTP servers, you may find managing all the authentication settings inconvenient and error-prone. The account-hook command may help. This hook works like folder-hook but is invoked whenever Mutt needs to access a remote mailbox (including inside the folder browser), not just when you open the mailbox. This includes (for example) polling for new mail, storing Fcc messages and saving messages to a folder. As a consequence, account-hook should only be used to set connection-related settings such as passwords or tunnel commands but not settings such as sender address or name (because in general it should be considered unpredictable which account-hook was last used). Some examples: account-hook . 'unset imap_user; unset imap_pass; unset tunnel' account-hook imap://host1/ 'set imap_user=me1 imap_pass=foo' account-hook imap://host2/ 'set tunnel="ssh host2 /usr/libexec/imapd"' account-hook smtp://user@host3/ 'set tunnel="ssh host3 /usr/libexec/smtpd"' To manage multiple accounts with, for example, different values of $record or sender addresses, folder-hook has to be be used together with the mailboxes command. Example 6.2. Managing multiple accounts mailboxes imap://user@host1/INBOX folder-hook imap://user@host1/ 'set folder=imap://host1/ ; set record=+INBOX/Sent' mailboxes imap://user@host2/INBOX folder-hook imap://user@host2/ 'set folder=imap://host2/ ; set record=+INBOX/Sent' In example Example 6.2, “Managing multiple accounts” the folders are defined using mailboxes so Mutt polls them for new mail. Each folder-hook triggers when one mailbox below each IMAP account is opened and sets $folder to the account's root folder. Next, it sets $record to the INBOX/Sent folder below the newly set $folder. Please notice that the value the “+” mailbox shortcut refers to depends on the current value of $folder and therefore has to be set separatedly per account. Setting other values like $from or $signature is analogous to setting $record. Mutt contains two types of local caching: (1) the so-called “header caching” and (2) the so-called “body caching” which are both described in this section. Header caching is optional as it depends on external libraries, body caching is always enabled if Mutt is compiled with POP and/or IMAP support as these use it (body caching requires no external library). Mutt provides optional support for caching message headers for the following types of folders: IMAP, POP, Maildir and MH. Header caching greatly improves speed because for remote folders, headers usually only need to be downloaded once. For Maildir and MH, reading the headers from a single file is much faster than looking at possibly thousands of single files (since Maildir and MH use one file per message.) Header caching can be enabled via the configure script and the --enable-hcache option. It's not turned on by default because external database libraries are required: one of tokyocabinet, qdbm, gdbm or bdb must be present. If enabled, $header_cache can be used to either point to a file or a directory. If set to point to a file, one database file for all folders will be used (which may result in lower performance), but one file per folder if it points to a directory. Both cache methods can be combined using the same directory for storage (and for IMAP/POP even provide meaningful file names) which simplifies manual maintenance tasks. In addition to caching message headers only, Mutt can also cache whole message bodies. This results in faster display of messages for POP and IMAP folders because messages usually have to be downloaded only once.
For configuration, the variable $message_cachedir must point to a
directory. There, Mutt will create a hierarchy of subdirectories
named like: Mutt does not (yet) support maintenance features for header cache database files so that files have to be removed in case they grow too big. It depends on the database library used for header caching whether disk space freed by removing messages is re-used. For body caches, Mutt can keep the local cache in sync with the remote mailbox if the $message_cache_clean variable is set. Cleaning means to remove messages from the cache which are no longer present in the mailbox which only happens when other mail clients or instances of Mutt using a different body cache location delete messages (Mutt itself removes deleted messages from the cache when syncing a mailbox). As cleaning can take a noticeable amount of time, it should not be set in general but only occasionally.
Mutt supports the “Name <user@host>” address syntax for reading and
writing messages, the older “user@host (Name)” syntax is only supported when
reading messages. The --enable-exact-address
switch can be given to configure to build it with write-support
for the latter syntax. You may also have compiled Mutt to co-operate with Mixmaster, an anonymous remailer. Mixmaster permits you to send your messages anonymously using a chain of remailers. Mixmaster support in Mutt is for mixmaster version 2.04 (beta 45 appears to be the latest) and 2.03. It does not support earlier versions or the later so-called version 3 betas, of which the latest appears to be called 2.9b23.
To use it, you'll have to obey certain restrictions. Most
important, you cannot use the The chain selection screen is divided into two parts. In the (larger) upper part, you get a list of remailers you may use. In the lower part, you see the currently selected chain of remailers.
You can navigate in the chain using the Note that different remailers do have different capabilities, indicated in the %c entry of the remailer menu lines (see $mix_entry_format). Most important is the “middleman” capability, indicated by a capital “M”: This means that the remailer in question cannot be used as the final element of a chain, but will only forward messages to other mixmaster remailers. For details on the other capabilities, please have a look at the mixmaster documentation. Table of Contents First of all, Mutt contains no security holes included by intention but may contain unknown security holes. As a consequence, please run Mutt only with as few permissions as possible. Especially, do not run Mutt as the super user. When configuring Mutt, there're some points to note about secure setups so please read this chapter carefully. Although Mutt can be told the various passwords for accounts, please never store passwords in configuration files. Besides the fact that the system's operator can always read them, you could forget to mask it out when reporting a bug or asking for help via a mailing list. Even worse, your mail including your password could be archived by internet search engines, mail-to-news gateways etc. It may already be too late before you notice your mistake. Mutt uses many temporary files for viewing messages, verifying digital signatures, etc. As long as being used, these files are visible by other users and maybe even readable in case of misconfiguration. Also, a different location for these files may be desired which can be changed via the $tmpdir variable. Message-Id: headers contain a local part that is to be created in a unique fashion. In order to do so, Mutt will “leak” some information to the outside world when sending messages: the generation of this header includes a step counter which is increased (and rotated) with every message sent. In a longer running mutt session, others can make assumptions about your mailing habbits depending on the number of messages sent. If this is not desired, the header can be manually provided using $edit_headers (though not recommended).
As Mutt be can be set up to be the mail client to handle
For example, following a link like mailto:joe@host?Attach=~/.gnupg/secring.gpg
will send out the user's private gnupg keyring to
Mutt in many places has to rely on external applications or for convenience supports mechanisms involving external applications.
One of these is the Besides the mailcap mechanism, Mutt uses a number of other external utilities for operation, for example to provide crypto support, in backtick expansion in configuration files or format string filters. The same security considerations apply for these as for tools involved via mailcap. Table of Contents Mutt's performance when reading mailboxes can be improved in two ways:
These settings work on a per-message basis. However, as messages may greatly differ in size and certain operations are much faster than others, even per-folder settings of the increment variables may not be desirable as they produce either too few or too much progress updates. Thus, Mutt allows to limit the number of progress updates per second it'll actually send to the terminal using the $time_inc variable. Reading messages from remote folders such as IMAP an POP can be slow especially for large mailboxes since Mutt only caches a very limited number of recently viewed messages (usually 10) per session (so that it will be gone for the next session.) To improve performance and permanently cache whole messages, please refer to Mutt's so-called body caching for details. When searching mailboxes either via a search or a limit action, for some patterns Mutt distinguishes between regular expression and string searches. For regular expressions, patterns are prefixed with “˜” and with “=” for string searches. Even though a regular expression search is fast, it's several times slower than a pure string search which is noticeable especially on large folders. As a consequence, a string search should be used instead of a regular expression search if the user already knows enough about the search pattern.
For example, when limiting a large folder to all messages sent to or by
an author, it's much faster to search for the initial part of an e-mail
address via As for regular expressions, a lower case string search pattern makes Mutt perform a case-insensitive search except for IMAP (because for IMAP Mutt performs server-side searches which don't support case-insensivity). Table of Contents
Running Table 9.1. Command line options
To read messages in a mailbox
To compose a new message
Mutt also supports a “batch” mode to send prepared messages. Simply redirect input from the file you wish to send. For example, mutt -s "data set for run #2" professor@bigschool.edu < ˜/run2.dat
will send a message to
All files passed with mutt -a image.png -- some@one.org or mutt -a *.png -- some@one.org Note
The The following are the commands understood by Mutt:
Type: quadoption If set to yes, when composing messages and no subject is given at the subject prompt, composition will be aborted. If set to no, composing messages with no subject given at the subject prompt will never be aborted. Type: quadoption If set to yes, composition will automatically abort after editing the message body if no changes are made to the file (this check only happens after the first edit of the file). When set to no, composition will never be aborted. Type: path
The default file in which to save aliases created by the
Note: Mutt will not automatically source this file; you must explicitly use the “source” command for it to be executed in case this option points to a dedicated alias file. The default for this option is the currently used muttrc file, or “˜/.muttrc” if no user muttrc was found. Type: string
Specifies the format of the data displayed for the “alias” menu. The
following
Type: boolean Controls whether 8-bit data is converted to 7-bit using either Quoted- Printable or Base64 encoding when sending mail. Type: boolean Controls whether ANSI color codes in messages (and color tags in rich text messages) are to be interpreted. Messages containing these codes are rare, but if this option is set, their text will be colored accordingly. Note that this may override your color choices, and even present a security problem, since a message could include a line like [-- PGP output follows ... and give it the same color as your attachment color (see also $crypt_timestamp). Type: boolean When set, an arrow (“->”) will be used to indicate the current entry in menus instead of highlighting the whole line. On slow network or modem links this will make response faster because there is less that has to be redrawn on the screen when moving to the next or previous entries in the menu. Type: boolean If set, Mutt will use plain ASCII characters when displaying thread and attachment trees, instead of the default ACS characters. Type: boolean If set, Mutt will prompt you for blind-carbon-copy (Bcc) recipients before editing an outgoing message. Type: boolean If set, Mutt will prompt you for carbon-copy (Cc) recipients before editing the body of an outgoing message. Type: string This variable is a colon-separated list of character encoding schemes for messages without character encoding indication. Header field values and message body content without character encoding indication would be assumed that they are written in one of this list. By default, all the header fields and message body without any charset indication are assumed to be in “us-ascii”. For example, Japanese users might prefer this: set assumed_charset="iso-2022-jp:euc-jp:shift_jis:utf-8" However, only the first content is valid for the message body. Type: string This variable is a colon-separated list of character encoding schemes for text file attachments. Mutt uses this setting to guess which encoding files being attached are encoded in to convert them to a proper character set given in $send_charset. If unset, the value of $charset will be used instead. For example, the following configuration would work for Japanese text handling: set attach_charset="iso-2022-jp:euc-jp:shift_jis:utf-8" Note: for Japanese users, “iso-2022-*” must be put at the head of the value as shown above if included. Type: string
This variable describes the format of the “attachment” menu. The
following
For an explanation of “soft-fill”, see the $index_format documentation. Type: string The separator to add between attachments when operating (saving, printing, piping, etc) on a list of tagged attachments. Type: boolean If this variable is unset, when operating (saving, printing, piping, etc) on a list of tagged attachments, Mutt will concatenate the attachments and will operate on them as a single attachment. The $attach_sep separator is added after each attachment. When set, Mutt will operate on the attachments one by one. Type: string
This is the string that will precede a message which has been included
in a reply. For a full listing of defined Type: boolean
When set, functions in the index menu which affect a message
will be applied to all tagged messages (if there are any). When
unset, you must first use the Type: boolean When set along with $edit_headers, Mutt will skip the initial send-menu (prompting for subject and recipients) and allow you to immediately begin editing the body of your message. The send-menu may still be accessed once you have finished editing the body of your message. Note: when this option is set, you cannot use send-hooks that depend on the recipients when composing a new (non-reply) message, as the initial list of recipients is empty. Also see $fast_reply. Type: boolean When this variable is set, mutt will beep when an error occurs. Type: boolean When this variable is set, mutt will beep whenever it prints a message notifying you of new mail. This is independent of the setting of the $beep variable. Type: quadoption Controls whether you will be asked to confirm bouncing messages. If set to yes you don't get asked if you want to bounce a message. Setting this variable to no is not generally useful, and thus not recommended, because you are unable to bounce messages. Type: boolean When this variable is set, mutt will include Delivered-To headers when bouncing messages. Postfix users may wish to unset this variable. Note: On Debian systems, this option is unset by default in /etc/Muttrc. Type: boolean When this variable is set, mutt will place the cursor at the beginning of the current line in menus, even when the $arrow_cursor variable is unset, making it easier for blind persons using Braille displays to follow these menus. The option is unset by default because many visual terminals don't permit making the cursor invisible. Type: path This variable specifies the file where the certificates you trust are saved. When an unknown certificate is encountered, you are asked if you accept it or not. If you accept it, the certificate can also be saved in this file and further connections are automatically accepted. You can also manually add CA certificates in this file. Any server certificate that is signed with one of these CA certificates is also automatically accepted. Example: set certificate_file=~/.mutt/certificates Type: string Character set your terminal uses to display and enter textual data. It is also the fallback for $send_charset.
Upon startup Mutt tries to derive this value from environment variables
such as Note: It should only be set in case Mutt isn't abled to determine the character set used correctly. Type: boolean When this variable is set, mutt will use file size attribute instead of access time when checking for new mail in mbox and mmdf folders. This variable is unset by default and should only be enabled when new mail detection for these folder types is unreliable or doesn't work. Note that enabling this variable should happen before any “mailboxes” directives occur in configuration files regarding mbox or mmdf folders because mutt needs to determine the initial new mail status of such a mailbox by performing a fast mailbox scan when it is defined. Afterwards the new mail status is tracked by file size changes. Type: boolean Note: this option only affects maildir and MH style mailboxes. When set, Mutt will check for new mail delivered while the mailbox is open. Especially with MH mailboxes, this operation can take quite some time since it involves scanning the directory and checking each file to see if it has already been looked at. If this variable is unset, no check for new mail is performed while the mailbox is open. Type: boolean When unset, Mutt will not collapse a thread if it contains any unread messages. Type: string
Controls the format of the status line displayed in the “compose”
menu. This string is similar to $status_format, but has its own
set of
See the text describing the $status_format option for more information on how to set $compose_format. Type: string When defined, Mutt will recode commands in rc files from this encoding to the current character set as specified by $charset and aliases written to $alias_file from the current character set. Please note that if setting $charset it must be done before setting $config_charset. Recoding should be avoided as it may render unconvertable characters as question marks which can lead to undesired side effects (for example in regular expressions). Type: boolean When set, Mutt will prompt for confirmation when appending messages to an existing mailbox. Type: boolean When set, Mutt will prompt for confirmation when saving messages to a mailbox which does not yet exist before creating it. Type: number Causes Mutt to timeout a network connection (for IMAP, POP or SMTP) after this many seconds if the connection is not able to be established. A negative value causes Mutt to wait indefinitely for the connection attempt to succeed. Type: string Sets the default Content-Type for the body of newly composed messages. Type: quadoption This variable controls whether or not copies of your outgoing messages will be saved for later references. Also see $record, $save_name, $force_name and “fcc-hook”. Type: boolean Setting this variable will cause Mutt to always attempt to PGP encrypt outgoing messages. This is probably only useful in connection to the “send-hook” command. It can be overridden by use of the pgp menu, when encryption is not required or signing is requested as well. If $smime_is_default is set, then OpenSSL is used instead to create S/MIME messages and settings can be overridden by use of the smime menu instead. (Crypto only) Type: boolean This variable controls whether or not mutt may automatically enable PGP encryption/signing for messages. See also $crypt_autoencrypt, $crypt_replyencrypt, $crypt_autosign, $crypt_replysign and $smime_is_default. Type: boolean Setting this variable will cause Mutt to always attempt to cryptographically sign outgoing messages. This can be overridden by use of the pgp menu, when signing is not required or encryption is requested as well. If $smime_is_default is set, then OpenSSL is used instead to create S/MIME messages and settings can be overridden by use of the smime menu instead of the pgp menu. (Crypto only) Type: boolean This variable controls whether or not mutt may automatically enable S/MIME encryption/signing for messages. See also $crypt_autoencrypt, $crypt_replyencrypt, $crypt_autosign, $crypt_replysign and $smime_is_default. Type: boolean If set, automatically PGP or OpenSSL encrypt replies to messages which are encrypted. (Crypto only) Type: boolean If set, automatically PGP or OpenSSL sign replies to messages which are signed. Note: this does not work on messages that are encrypted and signed! (Crypto only) Type: boolean If set, automatically PGP or OpenSSL sign replies to messages which are encrypted. This makes sense in combination with $crypt_replyencrypt, because it allows you to sign all messages which are automatically encrypted. This works around the problem noted in $crypt_replysign, that mutt is not able to find out whether an encrypted message is also signed. (Crypto only) Type: boolean If set, mutt will include a time stamp in the lines surrounding PGP or S/MIME output, so spoofing such lines is more difficult. If you are using colors to mark these lines, and rely on these, you may unset this setting. (Crypto only) Type: boolean This variable controls the use of the GPGME-enabled crypto backends. If it is set and Mutt was built with gpgme support, the gpgme code for S/MIME and PGP will be used instead of the classic code. Note that you need to set this option in .muttrc; it won't have any effect when used interactively. Type: boolean Controls whether mutt uses PKA (see http://www.g10code.de/docs/pka-intro.de.pdf) during signature verification (only supported by the GPGME backend). Type: quadoption If “yes”, always attempt to verify PGP or S/MIME signatures. If “ask-*”, ask whether or not to verify the signature. If “no”, never attempt to verify cryptographic signatures. (Crypto only) Type: string
This variable controls the format of the date printed by the “%d”
sequence in $index_format. This is passed to the Unless the first character in the string is a bang (“!”), the month and week day names are expanded according to the locale specified in the variable $locale. If the first character in the string is a bang, the bang is discarded, and the month and week day names in the rest of the string are expanded in the C locale (that is in US English). Type: string This variable controls how “message-hook”, “reply-hook”, “send-hook”, “send2-hook”, “save-hook”, and “fcc-hook” will be interpreted if they are specified with only a simple regexp, instead of a matching pattern. The hooks are expanded when they are declared, so a hook will be interpreted according to the value of this variable at the time the hook is declared. The default value matches if the message is either from a user matching the regular expression given, or if it is from you (if the from address matches “alternates”) and is to or cc'ed to a user matching the given regular expression. Type: quadoption Controls whether or not messages are really deleted when closing or synchronizing a mailbox. If set to yes, messages marked for deleting will automatically be purged without prompting. If set to no, messages marked for deletion will be kept in the mailbox. Type: boolean If this option is set, mutt will untag messages when marking them for deletion. This applies when you either explicitly delete a message, or when you save it to another folder. Type: boolean If this option is set, mutt's received-attachments menu will not show the subparts of individual messages in a multipart/digest. To see these subparts, press “v” on that menu. Type: path When set, specifies a command used to filter messages. When a message is viewed it is passed as standard input to $display_filter, and the filtered message is read from the standard output. Type: path
Contains the path of the Type: string This variable sets the request for when notification is returned. The string consists of a comma separated list (no spaces!) of one or more of the following: never, to never request notification, failure, to request notification on transmission failure, delay, to be notified of message delays, success, to be notified of successful transmission. Example: set dsn_notify="failure,delay"
Note: when using $sendmail for delivery, you should not enable
this unless you are either using Sendmail 8.8.x or greater or a MTA
providing a Type: string This variable controls how much of your message is returned in DSN messages. It may be set to either hdrs to return just the message header, or full to return the full message. Example: set dsn_return=hdrs
Note: when using $sendmail for delivery, you should not enable
this unless you are either using Sendmail 8.8.x or greater or a MTA
providing a Type: boolean This variable controls whether mutt, when $sort is set to threads, threads messages with the same Message-Id together. If it is set, it will indicate that it thinks they are duplicates of each other with an equals sign in the thread tree. Type: boolean This option allows you to edit the header of your outgoing messages along with the body of your message. Note that changes made to the References: and Date: headers are ignored for interoperability reasons. Type: path
This variable specifies which editor is used by mutt.
It defaults to the value of the Type: boolean When set, mutt will quoted-printable encode messages when they contain the string “From ” (note the trailing space) in the beginning of a line. This is useful to avoid the tampering certain mail delivery and transport agents tend to do with messages (in order to prevent tools from misinterpreting the line as a mbox message separator). Type: e-mail address Manually sets the envelope sender for outgoing messages. This value is ignored if $use_envelope_from is unset. Type: boolean When set, the initial prompt for recipients and subject are skipped when replying to messages, and the initial prompt for subject is skipped when forwarding messages. Note: this variable has no effect when the $autoedit variable is set. Type: quadoption This variable controls whether or not attachments on outgoing messages are saved along with the main body of your message. Type: boolean When this variable is set, FCCs will be stored unencrypted and unsigned, even when the actual message is encrypted and/or signed. (PGP only) Type: path Specifies the default location of your mailboxes. A “+” or “=” at the beginning of a pathname will be expanded to the value of this variable. Note that if you change this variable (from the default) value you need to make sure that the assignment occurs before you use “+” or “=” for any other variables since expansion takes place when handling the “mailboxes” command. Type: string
This variable allows you to customize the file browser display to your
personal taste. This string is similar to $index_format, but has
its own set of
For an explanation of “soft-fill”, see the $index_format documentation. Type: boolean Controls whether or not the “Mail-Followup-To:” header field is generated when sending mail. When set, Mutt will generate this field when you are replying to a known mailing list, specified with the “subscribe” or “lists” commands. This field has two purposes. First, preventing you from receiving duplicate copies of replies to messages which you send to mailing lists, and second, ensuring that you do get a reply separately for any messages sent to known lists to which you are not subscribed. The header will contain only the list's address for subscribed lists, and both the list address and your own email address for unsubscribed lists. Without this header, a group reply to your message sent to a subscribed list will be sent to both the list and your address, resulting in two copies of the same email for you. Type: boolean This variable is similar to $save_name, except that Mutt will store a copy of your outgoing message by the username of the address you are sending to even if that mailbox does not exist. Also see the $record variable. Type: boolean
Controls the decoding of complex MIME messages into Type: boolean Controls the handling of encrypted messages when forwarding a message. When set, the outer layer of encryption is stripped off. This variable is only used if $mime_forward is set and $mime_forward_decode is unset. (PGP only) Type: quadoption This quadoption controls whether or not the user is automatically placed in the editor when forwarding messages. For those who always want to forward with no modification, use a setting of “no”. Type: string This variable controls the default subject when forwarding a message. It uses the same format sequences as the $index_format variable. Type: boolean When set, forwarded messages included in the main body of the message (when $mime_forward is unset) will be quoted using $indent_string. Type: e-mail address When set, this variable contains a default from address. It can be overridden using “my_hdr” (including from a “send-hook”) and $reverse_name. This variable is ignored if $use_from is unset.
This setting defaults to the contents of the environment variable Type: regular expression
A regular expression used by mutt to parse the GECOS field of a password
entry when expanding the alias. The default value
will return the string up to the first “,” encountered.
If the GECOS field contains a string like “lastname, firstname” then you
should set it to “ This can be useful if you see the following behavior: you address an e-mail to user ID “stevef” whose full name is “Steve Franklin”. If mutt expands “stevef” to “"Franklin" stevef@foo.bar” then you should set the $gecos_mask to a regular expression that will match the whole name so mutt will expand “Franklin” to “Franklin, Steve”. Type: boolean When unset, the header fields normally added by the “my_hdr” command are not created. This variable must be unset before composing a new message or replying in order to take effect. If set, the user defined header fields are added to every new message. Type: boolean When set, this variable causes Mutt to include the header of the message you are replying to into the edit buffer. The $weed setting applies. Type: path This variable points to the header cache database. If pointing to a directory Mutt will contain a header cache database file per folder, if pointing to a file that file will be a single global header cache. By default it is unset so no header caching will be used. Header caching can greatly improve speed when opening POP, IMAP MH or Maildir folders, see “caching” for details. Type: boolean When mutt is compiled with qdbm or tokyocabinet as header cache backend, this option determines whether the database will be compressed. Compression results in database files roughly being one fifth of the usual diskspace, but the uncompression can result in a slower opening of cached folder(s) which in general is still much faster than opening non header cached folders. Type: boolean When set, help lines describing the bindings for the major functions provided by each menu are displayed on the first line of the screen. Note: The binding will not be displayed correctly if the function is bound to a sequence rather than a single keystroke. Also, the help line may not be updated if a binding is changed while Mutt is running. Since this variable is primarily aimed at new users, neither of these should present a major problem. 3.81. hidden_hostType: boolean When set, mutt will skip the host name part of $hostname variable when adding the domain part to addresses. This variable does not affect the generation of Message-IDs, and it will not lead to the cut-off of first-level domains. Type: boolean When set, mutt will not show the presence of messages that are hidden by limiting, in the thread tree. Type: boolean When set, mutt will not show the presence of missing messages in the thread tree. Type: boolean When set, mutt will not show the subject of messages in the thread tree that have the same subject as their parent or closest previously displayed sibling. Type: boolean When set, mutt will not show the presence of messages that are hidden by limiting, at the top of threads in the thread tree. Note that when $hide_limited is set, this option will have no effect. Type: boolean When set, mutt will not show the presence of missing messages at the top of threads in the thread tree. Note that when $hide_missing is set, this option will have no effect. Type: number This variable controls the size (in number of strings remembered) of the string history buffer per category. The buffer is cleared each time the variable is set. Type: path The file in which Mutt will save its history. Type: boolean When set, Mutt will not display attachments with a disposition of “attachment” inline even if it could render the part to plain text. These MIME parts can only be viewed from the attachment menu. If unset, Mutt will render all MIME parts it can properly transform to plain text. Type: quadoption This variable controls whether or not a Mail-Followup-To header is honored when group-replying to a message. Type: string Specifies the fully-qualified hostname of the system mutt is running on containing the host's name and the DNS domain it belongs to. It is used as the domain part (after “@”) for local email addresses as well as Message-Id headers.
Its value is determined at startup as follows: If the node's name
as returned by the Also see $use_domain and $hidden_host. Note: On Debian systems, the default for this variable is obtained from /etc/mailname when Mutt starts. Type: boolean This option replaces linear-white-space between encoded-word and text to a single space to prevent the display of MIME-encoded “Subject:” field from being divided into multiple lines. Type: boolean
Affects the behaviour of the Type: string This is a colon-delimited list of authentication methods mutt may attempt to use to log in to an IMAP server, in the order mutt should try them. Authentication methods are either “login” or the right side of an IMAP “AUTH=xxx” capability string, eg “digest-md5”, “gssapi” or “cram-md5”. This option is case-insensitive. If it's unset (the default) mutt will try all available methods, in order from most-secure to least-secure. Example: set imap_authenticators="gssapi:cram-md5:login" Note: Mutt will only fall back to other authentication methods if the previous methods are unavailable. If a method is available but authentication fails, mutt will not connect to the IMAP server. Type: boolean When set, mutt will fetch the set of subscribed folders from your server on connection, and add them to the set of mailboxes it polls for new mail just as if you had issued individual “mailboxes” commands. Type: string This contains the list of characters which you would like to treat as folder separators for displaying IMAP paths. In particular it helps in using the “=” shortcut for your folder variable. Type: string Mutt requests these header fields in addition to the default headers (“Date:”, “From:”, “Subject:”, “To:”, “Cc:”, “Message-Id:”, “References:”, “Content-Type:”, “Content-Description:”, “In-Reply-To:”, “Reply-To:”, “Lines:”, “List-Post:”, “X-Label:”) from IMAP servers before displaying the index menu. You may want to add more headers for spam detection. Note: This is a space separated list, items should be uppercase and not contain the colon, e.g. “X-BOGOSITY X-SPAM-STATUS” for the “X-Bogosity:” and “X-Spam-Status:” header fields. Type: boolean When set, mutt will attempt to use the IMAP IDLE extension to check for new mail in the current mailbox. Some servers (dovecot was the inspiration for this option) react badly to mutt's implementation. If your connection seems to freeze up periodically, try unsetting this. Type: number This variable specifies the maximum amount of time in seconds that mutt will wait before polling open IMAP connections, to prevent the server from closing them before mutt has finished with them. The default is well within the RFC-specified minimum amount of time (30 minutes) before a server is allowed to do this, but in practice the RFC does get violated every now and then. Reduce this number if you find yourself getting disconnected from your IMAP server due to inactivity. Type: boolean
This variable configures whether IMAP folder browsing will look for
only subscribed folders or all folders. This can be toggled in the
IMAP browser with the Type: string Your login name on the IMAP server. This variable defaults to the value of $imap_user. Type: string
Specifies the password for your IMAP account. If unset, Mutt will
prompt you for your password when you invoke the Warning: you should only use this option when you are on a fairly secure machine, because the superuser can read your muttrc even if you are the only one who can read the file. Type: boolean When set, mutt will not open new IMAP connections to check for new mail. Mutt will only check for new mail over existing IMAP connections. This is useful if you don't want to be prompted to user/password pairs on mutt invocation, or if opening the connection is slow. Type: boolean When set, mutt will avoid implicitly marking your mail as read whenever you fetch a message from the server. This is generally a good thing, but can make closing an IMAP folder somewhat slower. This option exists to appease speed freaks. Type: number Controls the number of IMAP commands that may be queued up before they are sent to the server. A deeper pipeline reduces the amount of time mutt must wait for the server, and can make IMAP servers feel much more responsive. But not all servers correctly handle pipelined commands, so if you have problems you might want to try setting this variable to 0. Note: Changes to this variable have no effect on open connections. Type: boolean When set, mutt will display warning messages from the IMAP server as error messages. Since these messages are often harmless, or generated due to configuration problems on the server which are out of the users' hands, you may wish to suppress them at some point. Type: string The name of the user whose mail you intend to access on the IMAP server. This variable defaults to your user name on the local machine. Type: boolean
If set to “yes”, mutt will look for a mailcap entry with the
“ Type: quadoption Controls whether or not a copy of the message(s) you are replying to is included in your reply. Type: boolean Controls whether or not Mutt includes only the first attachment of the message you are replying. Type: string Specifies the string to prepend to each line of text quoted in a message to which you are replying. You are strongly encouraged not to change this value, as it tends to agitate the more fanatical netizens. The value of this option is ignored if $text_flowed is set, too because the quoting mechanism is strictly defined for format=flowed.
This option is a format string, please see the description of
$index_format for supported Type: string This variable allows you to customize the message index display to your personal taste.
“Format strings” are similar to the strings used in the C
function
“Soft-fill” deserves some explanation: Normal right-justification will print everything to the left of the “%>”, displaying padding and whatever lies to the right only if there's room. By contrast, soft-fill gives priority to the right-hand side, guaranteeing space to display it and showing padding only if there's still room. If necessary, soft-fill will eat text leftwards to make room for rightward text. Note that these expandos are supported in “save-hook”, “fcc-hook” and “fcc-save-hook”, too. Type: boolean If set, read messages marked as flagged will not be moved from your spool mailbox to your $mbox mailbox, or as a result of a “mbox-hook” command. Type: string
The locale used by Type: number This variable configures how often (in seconds) mutt should look for new mail. Also see the $timeout variable. Type: string This variable specifies which files to consult when attempting to display MIME bodies not directly supported by Mutt. Type: boolean If set, mutt will restrict possible characters in mailcap % expandos to a well-defined set of safe characters. This is the safe setting, but we are not sure it doesn't break some more advanced MIME stuff. DON'T CHANGE THIS SETTING UNLESS YOU ARE REALLY SURE WHAT YOU ARE DOING! Type: boolean
Check for Maildir unaware programs other than mutt having modified maildir
files when the header cache is in use. This incurs one Type: boolean If set, messages marked as deleted will be saved with the maildir trashed flag instead of unlinked. Note: this only applies to maildir-style mailboxes. Setting it will have no effect on other mailbox types. Type: boolean Controls whether or not mutt marks new unread messages as old if you exit a mailbox without reading them. With this option set, the next time you start mutt, the messages will show up with an “O” next to them in the index menu, indicating that they are old. Type: boolean Controls the display of wrapped lines in the internal pager. If set, a “+” marker is displayed at the beginning of wrapped lines. Also see the $smart_wrap variable. Type: regular expression A regular expression used in the file browser, optionally preceded by the not operator “!”. Only files whose names match this mask will be shown. The match is always case-sensitive. Type: path This specifies the folder into which read mail in your $spoolfile folder will be appended. Also see the $move variable. Type: folder magic
The default mailbox type used when creating new folders. May be any of
“mbox”, “MMDF”, “MH” and “Maildir”. This is overridden by the
Type: number This variable controls the number of lines of context that are given when scrolling through menus. (Similar to $pager_context.) Type: boolean When unset, the bottom entry of menus will never scroll up past the bottom of the screen, unless there are less entries than lines. When set, the bottom entry may move off the bottom. Type: boolean When set, menus will be scrolled up or down one line when you attempt to move across a screen boundary. If unset, the screen is cleared and the next or previous page of the menu is displayed (useful for slow links to avoid many redraws). Type: boolean If set, mutt will clean out obsolete entries from the message cache when the mailbox is synchronized. You probably only want to set it every once in a while, since it can be a little slow (especially for large folders). Type: path Set this to a directory and mutt will cache copies of messages from your IMAP and POP servers here. You are free to remove entries at any time. When setting this variable to a directory, mutt needs to fetch every remote message only once and can perform regular expression searches as fast as for local folders. Also see the $message_cache_clean variable. Type: string
This is the string displayed in the “attachment” menu for
attachments of type Type: boolean
If set, forces Mutt to interpret keystrokes with the high bit (bit 8)
set as if the user had pressed the Esc key and whatever key remains
after having the high bit removed. For example, if the key pressed
has an ASCII value of Type: boolean If unset, Mutt will remove your address (see the “alternates” command) from the list of recipients when replying to a message. Type: boolean When unset, mutt will mimic mh's behaviour and rename deleted messages to ,<old file name> in mh folders instead of really deleting them. This leaves the message on disk but makes programs reading the folder ignore it. If the variable is set, the message files will simply be deleted. This option is similar to $maildir_trash for Maildir folders. Type: string The name of the MH sequence used for flagged messages. Type: string The name of the MH sequence used to tag replied messages. Type: string The name of the MH sequence used for unseen messages. Type: quadoption
When set, the message you are forwarding will be attached as a
separate Also see $forward_decode and $mime_forward_decode. Type: boolean
Controls the decoding of complex MIME messages into Type: quadoption When forwarding multiple attachments of a MIME message from the attachment menu, attachments which cannot be decoded in a reasonable manner will be attached to the newly composed message if this option is set. Type: string
This variable describes the format of a remailer line on the mixmaster
chain selection screen. The following
Type: path This variable contains the path to the Mixmaster binary on your system. It is used with various sets of parameters to gather the list of known remailers, and to finally send a message through the mixmaster chain. Note: On Debian systems, this option is set by default to “mixmaster-filter” in /etc/Muttrc. Type: quadoption Controls whether or not Mutt will move read messages from your spool mailbox to your $mbox mailbox, or as a result of a “mbox-hook” command. Type: boolean This variable, when set, makes the thread tree narrower, allowing deeper threads to fit on the screen. Type: number Operations that expect to transfer a large amount of data over the network will update their progress every $net_inc kilobytes. If set to 0, no progress messages will be displayed. See also $read_inc, $write_inc and $net_inc. Type: path This variable specifies which pager you would like to use to view messages. The value “builtin” means to use the builtin pager, otherwise this variable should specify the pathname of the external pager you would like to use. Using an external pager may have some disadvantages: Additional keystrokes are necessary because you can't call mutt functions directly from the pager, and screen resizes cause lines longer than the screen width to be badly formatted in the help menu. Type: number This variable controls the number of lines of context that are given when displaying the next or previous page in the internal pager. By default, Mutt will display the line after the last one on the screen at the top of the next page (0 lines of context). This variable also specifies the amount of context given for search results. If positive, this many lines will be given before a match, if 0, the match will be top-aligned. Type: string This variable controls the format of the one-line message “status” displayed before each message in either the internal or an external pager. The valid sequences are listed in the $index_format section. Type: number Determines the number of lines of a mini-index which is shown when in the pager. The current message, unless near the top or bottom of the folder, will be roughly one third of the way down this mini-index, giving the reader the context of a few messages before and after the message. This is useful, for example, to determine how many messages remain to be read in the current thread. One of the lines is reserved for the status bar from the index, so a setting of 6 will only show 5 lines of the actual index. A value of 0 results in no index being shown. If the number of messages in the current folder is less than $pager_index_lines, then the index will only use as many lines as it needs. Type: boolean
When set, the internal-pager will not move to the next message
when you are at the end of a message and invoke the Type: boolean
If set, mutt will automatically attempt to decrypt traditional PGP
messages whenever the user performs an operation which ordinarily would
result in the contents of the message being operated on. For example,
if the user displays a pgp-traditional message which has not been manually
checked with the Type: boolean This option controls whether Mutt generates old-style inline (traditional) PGP encrypted or signed messages under certain circumstances. This can be overridden by use of the pgp menu, when inline is not required. Note that Mutt might automatically use PGP/MIME for messages which consist of more than a single MIME part. Mutt can be configured to ask before sending PGP/MIME messages when inline (traditional) would not work. Also see the $pgp_mime_auto variable. Also note that using the old-style PGP message format is strongly deprecated. (PGP only) Type: boolean If set, mutt will check the exit code of the PGP subprocess when signing or encrypting. A non-zero exit code means that the subprocess failed. (PGP only) Type: string This format is used to create an old-style “clearsigned” PGP message. Note that the use of this format is strongly deprecated.
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: string This format strings specifies a command which is used to decode application/pgp attachments.
The PGP command formats have their own set of
For examples on how to configure these formats for the various versions
of PGP which are floating around, see the pgp and gpg sample configuration files in
the Type: string This command is used to decrypt a PGP encrypted message.
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: string This command is used to encrypt a body part without signing it.
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: string This command is used to both sign and encrypt a body part.
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: string
This variable allows you to customize the PGP key selection menu to
your personal taste. This string is similar to $index_format, but
has its own set of
(PGP only) Type: string This command is used to export a public key from the user's key ring.
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: string
This command is invoked whenever mutt will need public key information.
Of the sequences supported by $pgp_decode_command, %r is the only
Type: regular expression If you assign a text to this variable, then a PGP signature is only considered verified if the output from $pgp_verify_command contains the text. Use this variable if the exit code from the command is 0 even for bad signatures. (PGP only) Type: boolean Setting this variable will cause Mutt to ignore OpenPGP subkeys. Instead, the principal key will inherit the subkeys' capabilities. Unset this if you want to play interesting key selection games. (PGP only) Type: string This command is used to import a key from a message into the user's public key ring.
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: string This command is used to list the public key ring's contents. The output format must be analogous to the one used by gpg --list-keys --with-colons.
This format is also generated by the
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: string This command is used to list the secret key ring's contents. The output format must be analogous to the one used by: gpg --list-keys --with-colons.
This format is also generated by the
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: boolean If set, use 64 bit PGP key IDs, if unset use the normal 32 bit key IDs. (PGP only) Type: quadoption This option controls whether Mutt will prompt you for automatically sending a (signed/encrypted) message using PGP/MIME when inline (traditional) fails (for any reason). Also note that using the old-style PGP message format is strongly deprecated. (PGP only) Type: boolean Setting this variable will cause Mutt to always attempt to create an inline (traditional) message when replying to a message which is PGP encrypted/signed inline. This can be overridden by use of the pgp menu, when inline is not required. This option does not automatically detect if the (replied-to) message is inline; instead it relies on Mutt internals for previously checked/flagged messages. Note that Mutt might automatically use PGP/MIME for messages which consist of more than a single MIME part. Mutt can be configured to ask before sending PGP/MIME messages when inline (traditional) would not work. Also see the $pgp_mime_auto variable. Also note that using the old-style PGP message format is strongly deprecated. (PGP only) Type: boolean
If set, signed and encrypted messages will consist of nested
This is useful for applications like encrypted and signed mailing
lists, where the outer layer ( Type: boolean If set, mutt will display non-usable keys on the PGP key selection menu. This includes keys which have been revoked, have expired, or have been marked as “disabled” by the user. (PGP only) Type: string
If you have more than one key pair, this option allows you to specify
which of your private keys to use. It is recommended that you use the
keyid form to specify your key (e.g. Type: string
This command is used to create the detached PGP signature for a
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: sort order Specifies how the entries in the pgp menu are sorted. The following are legal values:
If you prefer reverse order of the above values, prefix it with “reverse-”. (PGP only) Type: boolean If set, Mutt will automatically encode PGP/MIME signed messages as quoted-printable. Please note that unsetting this variable may lead to problems with non-verifyable PGP signatures, so only change this if you know what you are doing. (PGP only) Type: number The number of seconds after which a cached passphrase will expire if not used. (PGP only) Type: boolean
If set, mutt will use a possibly-running Type: string This command is used to verify PGP signatures.
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: string This command is used to verify key information from the key selection menu.
This is a format string, see the $pgp_decode_command command for
possible Type: boolean
Used in connection with the Type: string The separator to add between messages when piping a list of tagged messages to an external Unix command. Type: boolean
Used in connection with the Type: boolean If set, Mutt will try all available authentication methods. When unset, Mutt will only fall back to other authentication methods if the previous methods are unavailable. If a method is available but authentication fails, Mutt will not connect to the POP server. Type: string This is a colon-delimited list of authentication methods mutt may attempt to use to log in to an POP server, in the order mutt should try them. Authentication methods are either “user”, “apop” or any SASL mechanism, eg “digest-md5”, “gssapi” or “cram-md5”. This option is case-insensitive. If this option is unset (the default) mutt will try all available methods, in order from most-secure to least-secure. Example: set pop_authenticators="digest-md5:apop:user" Type: number This variable configures how often (in seconds) mutt should look for new mail in the currently selected mailbox if it is a POP mailbox. Type: quadoption
If set, Mutt will delete successfully downloaded messages from the POP
server when using the Type: string
The name of your POP server for the [pop[s]://][username[:password]@]popserver[:port] where “[...]” denotes an optional part. Type: boolean
If this variable is set, mutt will try to use the “ Type: string Specifies the password for your POP account. If unset, Mutt will prompt you for your password when you open a POP mailbox. Warning: you should only use this option when you are on a fairly secure machine, because the superuser can read your muttrc even if you are the only one who can read the file. Type: quadoption Controls whether or not Mutt will try to reconnect to the POP server if the connection is lost. Type: string Your login name on the POP server. This variable defaults to your user name on the local machine. Type: string Similar to the $attribution variable, Mutt will append this string after the inclusion of a message which is being replied to. Type: quadoption Controls whether or not messages are saved in the $postponed mailbox when you elect not to send immediately. Also see the $recall variable. Type: path Mutt allows you to indefinitely “postpone sending a message” which you are editing. When you choose to postpone a message, Mutt saves it in the mailbox specified by this variable. Also see the $postpone variable. Type: string
If set, a shell command to be executed if mutt fails to establish
a connection to the server. This is useful for setting up secure
connections, e.g. with set preconnect="ssh -f -q -L 1234:mailhost.net:143 mailhost.net \ sleep 20 < /dev/null > /dev/null" Mailbox “foo” on “mailhost.net” can now be reached as “{localhost:1234}foo”. Note: For this example to work, you must be able to log in to the remote machine without having to enter a password. Type: quadoption Controls whether or not Mutt really prints messages. This is set to “ask-no” by default, because some people accidentally hit “p” often. Type: path This specifies the command pipe that should be used to print messages. Type: boolean
Used in connection with the Type: boolean
Used in connection with the
Those who use the Type: boolean If you use an external $pager, setting this variable will cause Mutt to prompt you for a command when the pager exits rather than returning to the index menu. If unset, Mutt will return to the index menu when the external pager exits. Type: path This specifies the command that mutt will use to make external address queries. The string should contain a “%s”, which will be substituted with the query string the user types. See “query” for more information. Type: string
This variable describes the format of the “query” menu. The
following
For an explanation of “soft-fill”, see the $index_format documentation. * = can be optionally printed if nonzero, see the $status_format documentation. Type: quadoption This variable controls whether “quit” and “exit” actually quit from mutt. If this option is set, they do quit, if it is unset, they have no effect, and if it is set to ask-yes or ask-no, you are prompted for confirmation when you try to quit. Type: regular expression
A regular expression used in the internal pager to determine quoted
sections of text in the body of a message. Quoted text may be filtered
out using the Higher levels of quoting may be colored differently (“color quoted1”, “color quoted2”, etc.). The quoting level is determined by removing the last character from the matched text and recursively reapplying the regular expression until it fails to produce a match. Match detection may be overridden by the $smileys regular expression. Type: number If set to a value greater than 0, Mutt will display which message it is currently on when reading a mailbox or when performing search actions such as search and limit. The message is printed after this many messages have been read or searched (e.g., if set to 25, Mutt will print a message when it is at message 25, and then again when it gets to message 50). This variable is meant to indicate progress when reading or searching large mailboxes which may take some time. When set to 0, only a single message will appear before the reading the mailbox. Also see the $write_inc, $net_inc and $time_inc variables and the “tuning” section of the manual for performance considerations. Type: string This variable specifies what “real” or “personal” name should be used when sending messages.
By default, this is the GECOS field from Type: quadoption Controls whether or not Mutt recalls postponed messages when composing a new message. Setting this variable to is not generally useful, and thus not recommended. Also see $postponed variable. Type: path This specifies the file into which your outgoing messages should be appended. (This is meant as the primary method for saving a copy of your messages, but another way to do this is using the “my_hdr” command to create a “Bcc:” field with your email address in it.) The value of $record is overridden by the $force_name and $save_name variables, and the “fcc-hook” command. 3.210. reply_regexpType: regular expression A regular expression used to recognize reply messages when threading and replying. The default value corresponds to the English "Re:" and the German "Aw:". 3.211. reply_selfType: boolean If unset and you are replying to a message sent by you, Mutt will assume that you want to reply to the recipients of that message rather than to yourself. Also see the “alternates” command. 3.212. reply_toType: quadoption If set, when replying to a message, Mutt will use the address listed in the Reply-to: header as the recipient of the reply. If unset, it will use the address in the From: header field instead. This option is useful for reading a mailing list that sets the Reply-To: header field to the list address and you want to send a private message to the author of a message. Type: boolean When set, the cursor will be automatically advanced to the next (possibly undeleted) message whenever a command that modifies the current message is executed. Type: boolean This variable controls whether or not Mutt will display the “personal” name from your aliases in the index menu if it finds an alias that matches the message's sender. For example, if you have the following alias: alias juser abd30425@somewhere.net (Joe User) and then you receive mail which contains the following header: From: abd30425@somewhere.net It would be displayed in the index menu as “Joe User” instead of “abd30425@somewhere.net.” This is useful when the person's e-mail address is not human friendly. Type: boolean It may sometimes arrive that you receive mail to a certain machine, move the messages to another machine, and reply to some the messages from there. If this variable is set, the default From: line of the reply messages is built using the address where you received the messages you are replying to if that address matches your “alternates”. If the variable is unset, or the address that would be used doesn't match your “alternates”, the From: line will use your address on the current machine. Also see the “alternates” command. Type: boolean This variable fine-tunes the behaviour of the $reverse_name feature. When it is set, mutt will use the address from incoming messages as-is, possibly including eventual real names. When it is unset, mutt will override any such real names with the setting of the $realname variable. Type: boolean When this variable is set, Mutt will decode RFC2047-encoded MIME parameters. You want to set this variable when mutt suggests you to save attachments to files named like: =?iso-8859-1?Q?file=5F=E4=5F991116=2Ezip?= When this variable is set interactively, the change won't be active until you change folders. Note that this use of RFC2047's encoding is explicitly prohibited by the standard, but nevertheless encountered in the wild. Also note that setting this parameter will not have the effect that mutt generates this kind of encoding. Instead, mutt will unconditionally use the encoding specified in RFC2231. Type: boolean If set, mutt will take the sender's full address when choosing a default folder for saving a mail. If $save_name or $force_name is set too, the selection of the Fcc folder will be changed as well. Type: boolean When unset, mailboxes which contain no saved messages will be removed when closed (the exception is $spoolfile which is never removed). If set, mailboxes are never removed. Note: This only applies to mbox and MMDF folders, Mutt does not delete MH and Maildir directories. Type: number This variable controls the size of the history (per category) saved in the $history_file file. Type: boolean This variable controls how copies of outgoing messages are saved. When set, a check is made to see if a mailbox specified by the recipient address exists (this is done by searching for a mailbox in the $folder directory with the username part of the recipient address). If the mailbox exists, the outgoing message will be saved to that mailbox, otherwise the message is saved to the $record mailbox. Also see the $force_name variable. Type: boolean When this variable is unset, scoring is turned off. This can be useful to selectively disable scoring for certain folders when the $score_threshold_delete variable and related are used. Type: number Messages which have been assigned a score equal to or lower than the value of this variable are automatically marked for deletion by mutt. Since mutt scores are always greater than or equal to zero, the default setting of this variable will never mark a message for deletion. Type: number Messages which have been assigned a score greater than or equal to this variable's value are automatically marked "flagged". Type: number Messages which have been assigned a score equal to or lower than the value of this variable are automatically marked as read by mutt. Since mutt scores are always greater than or equal to zero, the default setting of this variable will never mark a message read. Type: number For the pager, this variable specifies the number of lines shown before search results. By default, search results will be top-aligned. Type: string A colon-delimited list of character sets for outgoing messages. Mutt will use the first character set into which the text can be converted exactly. If your $charset is not “iso-8859-1” and recipients may not understand “UTF-8”, it is advisable to include in the list an appropriate widely used standard character set (such as “iso-8859-2”, “koi8-r” or “iso-2022-jp”) either instead of or after “iso-8859-1”. In case the text cannot be converted into one of these exactly, mutt uses $charset as a fallback. Type: path Specifies the program and arguments used to deliver mail sent by Mutt. Mutt expects that the specified program interprets additional arguments as recipient addresses. Type: number Specifies the number of seconds to wait for the $sendmail process to finish before giving up and putting delivery in the background. Mutt interprets the value of this variable as follows:
Note that if you specify a value other than 0, the output of the child process will be put in a temporary file. If there is some error, you will be informed as to where to find the output. Type: path
Command to use when spawning a subshell. By default, the user's login
shell from Type: boolean If set, a line containing “-- ” (note the trailing space) will be inserted before your $signature. It is strongly recommended that you not unset this variable unless your signature contains just your name. The reason for this is because many software packages use “-- \n” to detect your signature. For example, Mutt has the ability to highlight the signature in a different color in the builtin pager. Type: boolean If set, the signature will be included before any quoted or forwarded text. It is strongly recommended that you do not set this variable unless you really know what you are doing, and are prepared to take some heat from netiquette guardians. Type: path Specifies the filename of your signature, which is appended to all outgoing messages. If the filename ends with a pipe (“|”), it is assumed that filename is a shell command and input should be read from its standard output. Type: string Specifies how Mutt should expand a simple search into a real search pattern. A simple search is one that does not contain any of the “˜” pattern operators. See “patterns” for more information on search patterns. For example, if you simply type “joe” at a search or limit prompt, Mutt will automatically expand it to the value specified by this variable by replacing “%s” with the supplied string. For the default value, “joe” would be expanded to: “˜f joe | ˜s joe”. Type: number Specifies time, in seconds, to pause while displaying certain informational messages, while moving from folder to folder and after expunging messages from the current folder. The default is to pause one second, so a value of zero for this option suppresses the pause. Type: boolean Controls the display of lines longer than the screen width in the internal pager. If set, long lines are wrapped at a word boundary. If unset, lines are simply wrapped at the screen edge. Also see the $markers variable. Type: regular expression The pager uses this variable to catch some common false positives of $quote_regexp, most notably smileys and not consider a line quoted text if it also matches $smileys. This mostly happens at the beginning of a line. Type: string This option sets the filename used for signature parts in PGP/MIME signed messages. Type: string This option sets the Content-Description used for signature parts in PGP/MIME signed messages. Type: boolean This flag controls whether you want to be asked to enter a label for a certificate about to be added to the database or not. It is set by default. (S/MIME only) Type: path This variable contains the name of either a directory, or a file which contains trusted certificates for use with OpenSSL. (S/MIME only) Note: On Debian systems, this defaults to the first existing file in the following list: ˜/.smime/ca-certificates.crt ˜/.smime/ca-bundle.crt /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt. Type: path Since for S/MIME there is no pubring/secring as with PGP, mutt has to handle storage and retrieval of keys by itself. This is very basic right now, and keys and certificates are stored in two different directories, both named as the hash-value retrieved from OpenSSL. There is an index file which contains mailbox-address keyid pairs, and which can be manually edited. This option points to the location of the certificates. (S/MIME only) Type: string
This format string specifies a command which is used to decrypt
The OpenSSL command formats have their own set of
For examples on how to configure these formats, see the Type: boolean If set (default) this tells mutt to use the default key for decryption. Otherwise, if managing multiple certificate-key-pairs, mutt will try to use the mailbox-address to determine the key to use. It will ask you to supply a key, if it can't find one. (S/MIME only) Type: string This is the default key-pair to use for signing. This must be set to the keyid (the hash-value that OpenSSL generates) to work properly (S/MIME only) Type: string This command is used to create encrypted S/MIME messages.
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: string This sets the algorithm that should be used for encryption. Valid choices are “des”, “des3”, “rc2-40”, “rc2-64”, “rc2-128”. If unset, “3des” (TripleDES) is used. (S/MIME only) Type: string This command is used to extract X509 certificates from a PKCS7 structure.
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: string This command is used to extract the mail address(es) used for storing X509 certificates, and for verification purposes (to check whether the certificate was issued for the sender's mailbox).
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: string This command is used to extract only the signers X509 certificate from a S/MIME signature, so that the certificate's owner may get compared to the email's “From:” field.
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: string This command is used to import a certificate via smime_keys.
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: boolean The default behaviour of mutt is to use PGP on all auto-sign/encryption operations. To override and to use OpenSSL instead this must be set. However, this has no effect while replying, since mutt will automatically select the same application that was used to sign/encrypt the original message. (Note that this variable can be overridden by unsetting $crypt_autosmime.) (S/MIME only) Type: path Since for S/MIME there is no pubring/secring as with PGP, mutt has to handle storage and retrieval of keys/certs by itself. This is very basic right now, and stores keys and certificates in two different directories, both named as the hash-value retrieved from OpenSSL. There is an index file which contains mailbox-address keyid pair, and which can be manually edited. This option points to the location of the private keys. (S/MIME only) Type: string This command is used to extract PKCS7 structures of S/MIME signatures, in order to extract the public X509 certificate(s).
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: string
This command is used to created S/MIME signatures of type
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: string
This command is used to created S/MIME signatures of type
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: number The number of seconds after which a cached passphrase will expire if not used. (S/MIME only) Type: string
This command is used to verify S/MIME signatures of type
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: string
This command is used to verify S/MIME signatures of type
This is a format string, see the $smime_decrypt_command command for
possible Type: string This is a colon-delimited list of authentication methods mutt may attempt to use to log in to an SMTP server, in the order mutt should try them. Authentication methods are any SASL mechanism, eg “digest-md5”, “gssapi” or “cram-md5”. This option is case-insensitive. If it is “unset” (the default) mutt will try all available methods, in order from most-secure to least-secure. Example: set smtp_authenticators="digest-md5:cram-md5" Note: On Debian systems, this variable defaults to the example mentioned. This file is managed by the “ca-certificates” package. Type: string Specifies the password for your SMTP account. If unset, Mutt will prompt you for your password when you first send mail via SMTP. See $smtp_url to configure mutt to send mail via SMTP. Warning: you should only use this option when you are on a fairly secure machine, because the superuser can read your muttrc even if you are the only one who can read the file. Type: string Defines the SMTP smarthost where sent messages should relayed for delivery. This should take the form of an SMTP URL, eg: smtp[s]://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/ where “[...]” denotes an optional part. Setting this variable overrides the value of the $sendmail variable. Type: sort order Specifies how to sort messages in the “index” menu. Valid values are:
You may optionally use the “reverse-” prefix to specify reverse sorting
order (example: “ Note: On Debian systems, this option is set by default to “threads” in /etc/Muttrc. Type: sort order Specifies how the entries in the “alias” menu are sorted. The following are legal values:
Type: sort order When sorting by threads, this variable controls how threads are sorted in relation to other threads, and how the branches of the thread trees are sorted. This can be set to any value that $sort can, except “threads” (in that case, mutt will just use “date-sent”). You can also specify the “last-” prefix in addition to the “reverse-” prefix, but “last-” must come after “reverse-”. The “last-” prefix causes messages to be sorted against its siblings by which has the last descendant, using the rest of $sort_aux as an ordering. For instance, set sort_aux=last-date-received
would mean that if a new message is received in a
thread, that thread becomes the last one displayed (or the first, if
you have “ Note: For reversed $sort order $sort_aux is reversed again (which is not the right thing to do, but kept to not break any existing configuration setting). Type: sort order Specifies how to sort entries in the file browser. By default, the entries are sorted alphabetically. Valid values:
You may optionally use the “reverse-” prefix to specify reverse sorting
order (example: “ Type: boolean This variable is only useful when sorting by threads with $strict_threads unset. In that case, it changes the heuristic mutt uses to thread messages by subject. With $sort_re set, mutt will only attach a message as the child of another message by subject if the subject of the child message starts with a substring matching the setting of $reply_regexp. With $sort_re unset, mutt will attach the message whether or not this is the case, as long as the non-$reply_regexp parts of both messages are identical. Type: string This variable controls what happens when multiple spam headers are matched: if unset, each successive header will overwrite any previous matches value for the spam label. If set, each successive match will append to the previous, using this variable's value as a separator. Type: path
If your spool mailbox is in a non-default place where Mutt cannot find
it, you can specify its location with this variable. Mutt will
initially set this variable to the value of the environment
variable Type: path This variable specifies a file containing trusted CA certificates. Any server certificate that is signed with one of these CA certificates is also automatically accepted. Example: set ssl_ca_certificates_file=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt Type: path The file containing a client certificate and its associated private key. Type: boolean If this variable is set, Mutt will require that all connections to remote servers be encrypted. Furthermore it will attempt to negotiate TLS even if the server does not advertise the capability, since it would otherwise have to abort the connection anyway. This option supersedes $ssl_starttls. Type: number This variable specifies the minimum acceptable prime size (in bits) for use in any Diffie-Hellman key exchange. A value of 0 will use the default from the GNUTLS library. Type: quadoption
If set (the default), mutt will attempt to use Type: boolean This variable specifies whether to attempt to use SSLv3 in the SSL authentication process. Type: boolean This variable specifies whether to attempt to use TLSv1 in the SSL authentication process. Type: boolean
If set (the default), mutt will not automatically accept a server
certificate that is either not yet valid or already expired. You should
only unset this for particular known hosts, using the
Type: boolean
If set (the default), mutt will not automatically accept a server
certificate whose host name does not match the host used in your folder
URL. You should only unset this for particular known hosts, using
the Type: string
Controls the characters used by the “%r” indicator in
$status_format. The first character is used when the mailbox is
unchanged. The second is used when the mailbox has been changed, and
it needs to be resynchronized. The third is used if the mailbox is in
read-only mode, or if the mailbox will not be written when exiting
that mailbox (You can toggle whether to write changes to a mailbox
with the Type: string
Controls the format of the status line displayed in the “index”
menu. This string is similar to $index_format, but has its own
set of
For an explanation of “soft-fill”, see the $index_format documentation. * = can be optionally printed if nonzero Some of the above sequences can be used to optionally print a string if their value is nonzero. For example, you may only want to see the number of flagged messages if such messages exist, since zero is not particularly meaningful. To optionally print a string based upon one of the above sequences, the following construct is used:
where sequence_char is a character from the table above, and optional_string is the string you would like printed if sequence_char is nonzero. optional_string may contain other sequences as well as normal text, but you may not nest optional strings. Here is an example illustrating how to optionally print the number of new messages in a mailbox:
You can also switch between two strings using the following construct:
If the value of sequence_char is non-zero, if_string will be expanded, otherwise else_string will be expanded.
You can force the result of any If you prefix the sequence character with a colon (“:”) character, mutt will replace any dots in the expansion by underscores. This might be helpful with IMAP folders that don't like dots in folder names. Type: boolean Setting this variable causes the “status bar” to be displayed on the first line of the screen rather than near the bottom. If $help is set, too it'll be placed at the bottom. Type: boolean If set, threading will only make use of the “In-Reply-To” and “References:” fields when you $sort by message threads. By default, messages with the same subject are grouped together in “pseudo threads.”. This may not always be desirable, such as in a personal mailbox where you might have several unrelated messages with the subjects like “hi” which will get grouped together. See also $sort_re for a less drastic way of controlling this behaviour. Type: boolean
When unset, mutt won't stop when the user presses the terminal's
susp key, usually “^Z”. This is useful if you run mutt
inside an xterm using a command like “ Type: boolean
When set, mutt will generate “format=flowed” bodies with a content type
of “ Note that $indent_string is ignored when this option is set. Type: boolean
Affects the Users searching attachments or for non-ASCII characters should set this value because decoding also includes MIME parsing/decoding and possible character set conversions. Otherwise mutt will attempt to match against the raw message received (for example quoted-printable encoded or with encoded headers) which may lead to incorrect search results. Type: boolean When set, mutt uses the date received rather than the date sent to thread messages by subject. Type: boolean When set, the internal-pager will pad blank lines to the bottom of the screen with a tilde (“˜”). Type: number Along with $read_inc, $write_inc, and $net_inc, this variable controls the frequency with which progress updates are displayed. It suppresses updates less than $time_inc milliseconds apart. This can improve throughput on systems with slow terminals, or when running mutt on a remote system. Also see the “tuning” section of the manual for performance considerations. Type: number When Mutt is waiting for user input either idleing in menus or in an interactive prompt, Mutt would block until input is present. Depending on the context, this would prevent certain operations from working, like checking for new mail or keeping an IMAP connection alive. This variable controls how many seconds Mutt will at most wait until it aborts waiting for input, performs these operations and continues to wait for input. A value of zero or less will cause Mutt to never time out. Type: path
This variable allows you to specify where Mutt will place its
temporary files needed for displaying and composing messages. If
this variable is not set, the environment variable Type: string Controls the character used to indicate mail addressed to you. The first character is the one used when the mail is not addressed to your address. The second is used when you are the only recipient of the message. The third is when your address appears in the “To:” header field, but you are not the only recipient of the message. The fourth character is used when your address is specified in the “Cc:” header field, but you are not the only recipient. The fifth character is used to indicate mail that was sent by you. The sixth character is used to indicate when a mail was sent to a mailing-list you subscribe to. Type: path If set, this variable specifies the path of the trash folder where the mails marked for deletion will be moved, instead of being irremediably purged. NOTE: When you delete a message in the trash folder, it is really deleted, so that you have a way to clean the trash. Type: string Setting this variable will cause mutt to open a pipe to a command instead of a raw socket. You may be able to use this to set up preauthenticated connections to your IMAP/POP3/SMTP server. Example: set tunnel="ssh -q mailhost.net /usr/local/libexec/imapd" Note: For this example to work you must be able to log in to the remote machine without having to enter a password. When set, Mutt uses the tunnel for all remote connections. Please see “account-hook” in the manual for how to use different tunnel commands per connection. Type: boolean When set, Mutt will jump to the next unread message, if any, when the current thread is uncollapsed. Type: boolean
Warning: do not set this variable unless you are using a version
of sendmail which supports the
When set, Mutt will invoke $sendmail with the Type: boolean When set, Mutt will qualify all local addresses (ones without the “@host” portion) with the value of $hostname. If unset, no addresses will be qualified. Type: boolean When set, mutt will set the envelope sender of the message. If $envelope_from_address is set, it will be used as the sender address. If unset, mutt will attempt to derive the sender from the “From:” header.
Note that this information is passed to sendmail command using the
Type: boolean When set, Mutt will generate the “From:” header field when sending messages. If unset, no “From:” header field will be generated unless the user explicitly sets one using the “my_hdr” command. Type: boolean When set, Mutt will show you international domain names decoded. Note: You can use IDNs for addresses even if this is unset. This variable only affects decoding. Type: boolean When set, Mutt will look for IPv6 addresses of hosts it tries to contact. If this option is unset, Mutt will restrict itself to IPv4 addresses. Normally, the default should work. Type: boolean When set, mutt will add a “User-Agent:” header to outgoing messages, indicating which version of mutt was used for composing them. Type: path
Specifies the visual editor to invoke when the “ Type: boolean
Controls whether Mutt will ask you to press a key after an external command
has been invoked by these functions: It is also used when viewing attachments with “auto_view”, provided that the corresponding mailcap entry has a needsterminal flag, and the external program is interactive. When set, Mutt will always ask for a key. When unset, Mutt will wait for a key only if the external command returned a non-zero status. Type: boolean When set, mutt will weed headers when displaying, forwarding, printing, or replying to messages. Type: number When set to a positive value, mutt will wrap text at $wrap characters. When set to a negative value, mutt will wrap text so that there are $wrap characters of empty space on the right side of the terminal. Type: boolean Controls whether searches wrap around the end. When set, searches will wrap around the first (or last) item. When unset, incremental searches will not wrap. Type: number (DEPRECATED) Equivalent to setting $wrap with a negative value. Type: boolean Controls whether mutt writes out the Bcc header when saving messages to FCC. Bcc headers will never be written to a message when sending it. Note: this behavior is Debian specific. Type: number When writing a mailbox, a message will be printed every $write_inc messages to indicate progress. If set to 0, only a single message will be displayed before writing a mailbox. Also see the $read_inc, $net_inc and $time_inc variables and the “tuning” section of the manual for performance considerations. Type: string Controls the format of the icon title, as long as xterm_set_titles is enabled. This string is identical in formatting to the one used by “$status_format”. Type: boolean Controls whether mutt sets the xterm title bar and icon name (as long as you are in an appropriate terminal). Type: string Controls the format of the title bar of the xterm provided that xterm_set_titles has been set. This string is identical in formatting to the one used by “$status_format”. The following is the list of available functions listed by the mapping in which they are available. The default key setting is given, and an explanation of what the function does. The key bindings of these functions can be changed with the bind command. The generic menu is not a real menu, but specifies common functions (such as movement) available in all menus except for pager and editor. Changing settings for this menu will affect the default bindings for all menus (except as noted). Table 9.2. Default generic Function Bindings
Table 9.3. Default index Function Bindings
Table 9.4. Default pager Function Bindings
Table 9.5. Default alias Function Bindings
Table 9.6. Default query Function Bindings
Table 9.7. Default attach Function Bindings
Table 9.8. Default compose Function Bindings
Table 9.9. Default postpone Function Bindings
Table 9.10. Default browser Function Bindings
Table 9.11. Default pgp Function Bindings
Table 9.12. Default smime Function Bindings
Table 9.13. Default mix Function Bindings
Table 9.14. Default editor Function Bindings
Table of Contents
Kari Hurtta The following people have been very helpful to the development of Mutt:
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