Quick Tips for Switching to Mutt

Things you'll want to reference:

• The Official Mutt Manual. The reference section lists all the configuration options and variables.
• A Mutt Usage Overview (specifically, read the main overview if you are new to mutt).
• Usefull Patches, addons, etc (If you want to compile your own mutt)
• Roland's muttrc (described here.

Things you'll want to do to get started:

• Setup your key bindings (described here. As examples, you can read my keybind file (called by source ~/.mutt/keybind, or Roland's.
• Setup your mailcap file. Mutt is very good about handling MIME mail. You can automatically have MIME attachments converted into text, or do just about anything. (Yes, you can actually read HTML mail, Word docs, etc in your mail).Your system should have an /etc/mailcap installed, but you will probably want to change its behavior a bit. As examples, you can read my mailcap file (called by source ~/.mutt/mailcap, or Roland's. You will probably want to install some third party programs, like catdoc, antiword, mswordview for word docs, and lynx or w3m for html.
• Make sure procmail is setup. It should be installed on your system, and you should have the following in your ~/.forward:

  "|IFS=' '&&p=/usr/bin/procmail&&test -f $p&&exec $p -Yf-||exit 75 #your_username_here"

• Setup gpg, and enable PGP procmail filtering.
• Setup mailing lists (at a minimum do subscribe mailing_list.
• Setup color (e.g.

  color index red		black  ~D	# Deleted
  color index brightwhite	black  ~F	# Flagged
  color index magenta	black  ~T	# Tagged
  color index yellow	black  ~N	# New
  color index cyan	black	"~N ~p"			# New and to me
  color index magenta	black	"~C upl@"	# To upl 

Did You Know... (Things I wished I had known when I started using mutt)

• You can search for messages in your current mailbox using complex regular expressions! Type / then pattern text. E.g.: ~f Bob.
• You can Limit your display to messages matching a pattern with L. Similarly, you can tag messages matching a pattern using T. If you have auto_tag set, following commands will be run on the tagged messages.