Mutt is a

text-based In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI) (alternately terminal user interfaces, to reflect a dependence upon the properties of computer terminals and not just text), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an ear ...

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

systems. It was originally written by Michael Elkins in 1995 and released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

version 2 or any later version. The Mutt slogan is "''All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.''"

Operation

Mutt supports most mail storing formats (notably both

mbox Mbox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of email messages. It was first implemented in Research Unix, Fifth Edition Unix. All messages in an mbox mailbox are Concatenation, concatenated and store ...

and

Maildir The Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing email messages on a file system, rather than in a database. Each message is assigned a Computer file, file with a unique name, and each mail folder is a file system directory containing these fil ...

) and protocols (

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, i ...

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

, etc.). It also includes

MIME A mime artist, or simply mime (from Greek language, Greek , , "imitator, actor"), is a person who uses ''mime'' (also called ''pantomime'' outside of Britain), the acting out of a story through body motions without the use of speech, as a the ...

support, notably full PGP/ GPG and S/MIME integration. Mutt was originally designed as a

Mail User Agent The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal sy ...

(MUA) and relied on locally accessible mailbox and

sendmail Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. A descendant of t ...

infrastructure. According to the Mutt homepage "though written from scratch, Mutt's initial interface was based largely on the ELM mail client". New to Mutt were message scoring and threading capabilities. Support for fetching and sending email via various protocols such as POP3, IMAP and

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typi ...

was added later. However, Mutt still relies on external tools for composing and filtering messages. Mutt has hundreds of configuration directives and commands. It allows for changing all the key bindings and making keyboard macros for complex actions, as well as the colors and the layout of most of the interface. Through variants of a concept known as "hooks", many of its settings can be changed based on criteria such as current mailbox or outgoing message recipients. Mutt supports an optional sidebar, similar to those often found in graphical mail clients. There are also many patches and extensions available that add functionality, such as NNTP support. Mutt is fully controlled with the keyboard, and has support for mail

conversation threading Conversation threading is a Graphical user interface, feature used by many email clients, Bulletin board system, bulletin boards, newsgroups, and Internet forums in which the software aids the user by visually grouping messages with their repli ...

, meaning one can easily move around long discussions such as in mailing lists. New messages are composed with an external

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to c ...

, unlike

pine A pine is any conifer tree or shrub in the genus ''Pinus'' () of the family Pinaceae. ''Pinus'' is the sole genus in the subfamily Pinoideae. ''World Flora Online'' accepts 134 species-rank taxa (119 species and 15 nothospecies) of pines as cu ...

, which embeds its own editor known as pico. Mutt is capable of efficiently searching mail stores by calling on mail indexing tools such as Notmuch, and many people recommend Mutt be used this way. Alternatively, users can search their mail stores from Mutt by calling

grep grep is a command-line utility for searching plaintext datasets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p (global regular expression search and print), which has the same effect. grep was originally de ...

via a Bash script. Mutt is often used by security professionals or security-conscious users because of its smaller

attack surface The attack surface of a software environment is the sum of the different points (for " attack vectors") where an unauthorized user (the "attacker") can try to enter data to, extract data, control a device or critical software in an environment. Ke ...

compared with other clients that ship with a web browser rendering engine or a

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

interpreter. In relation to

Transport Layer Security Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network, such as the Internet. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over ...

, Mutt can be configured to trust certificates on first use, and not to use older, less secure versions of the

protocol.

References

External links

*
NeoMutt
a fork of Mutt with added features * {{DEFAULTSORT:Mutt (email client) Email client software for Linux Unix Internet software Free email software Free software that uses ncurses Software that uses S-Lang MacOS email clients Console applications

Operation

See also

References

External links