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Power Up Your E-Mail with Mutt

Issue 173

From Issue #173
September 2008

Sep 01, 2008  By Victor Gregorio
 in
Tired of your e-mail client hogging all your system resources? Experience the low-cost power of Mutt.
Moving Forward

Do the keyboard commands seem obscure? They may at first, but they quickly will become resounding strokes of e-mail power chords. The effort will pay off. Mutt still is in active development, and you can expect this underdog to be around for a while.

There are some interesting features on the horizon for Mutt version 1.6. Brendan Cully, a Mutt developer and the SourceForge project administrator, provided this list of Mutt 1.6's features:

  • Native SMTP support.

  • IMAP/POP header and body caching, and maildir/MH header caching.

  • Significant IMAP performance enhancements (pipelined commands and IDLE support).

  • IMAP server-side search.

  • Flowed text support.

  • More flexible charset support.

  • User-defined variables (starting with $my_).

  • Large file support.

  • Attachment counts in the index.

  • Spam flagging.

  • S/MIME support.

Whatever version you use, check www.mutt.org for release details. If you want more, the muttrc(5) man page can walk you through all of the .muttrc parameters, and the mutt.org site has more examples. If you are feeling lazy, use muttrcbuilder.org to build a .muttrc file.

I hope that you have found some value in Mutt and that it improves your e-mail experience. If nothing else, Mutt can be an additional power tool in your sysadmin toolchest.

Resources

The Mutt E-Mail Client: www.mutt.org

The abook Address Book Program: abook.sourceforge.net

On-line .muttrc Generator: www.muttrcbuilder.org

Victor Gregorio lives in San Francisco, California, working as a Senior System Administrator and QA Engineer for Penguin Computing. He often can be found behind a camera or clicking away at a keyboard.

______________________

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THanks

Rany Albeg's picture
Submitted by Rany Albeg (not verified) on Mon, 04/13/2009 - 16:30.

Finally a great article about this nice e-mail editor.GREAT JOB!!!!!

Awesome!

Ian MacGregor's picture
Submitted by Ian MacGregor (not verified) on Tue, 12/30/2008 - 11:47.

Thank you for this wonderful article. Your information allowed me to finish configuring mutt for myself and my friends.

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