
Mutt 1.6 - janvdberg
http://www.mutt.org/changes.html
======
hellofunk
I'll never forget, for the rest of my life, a devastating email scenario that
I was one keypress away from executing that would have had serious dire
consequences.

It was 2003 and I was a dedicated and exclusive Mutt user (this, before Gmail
came along).

Due to some accidental press of the wrong key combination, somehow Mutt
managed to take every single email in my Sent folder and combine it into one
gigantic aggregate text document -- a record of all emails I'd ever sent from
that account -- and turn this aggregate itself into an outgoing email, ready
for sending.

What's worse, it took every address that had ever been in a To: field in any
Sent mail and put them all as one big list in this aggregate email's To field!

With just one more keypress, had I accidentally then sent this, every person
I'd ever emailed would have received a copy of every email to any person I'd
ever sent.

Can you imagine the disaster? That I could concoct such an email accidentally
was terribly frightening and that was the last year I ever used Mutt.

~~~
yoavm
Well, if you _do_ want to send all-your-emails-since-ever to all-your-
contacts, I bet it's a lot harder to do in Gmail. Perhaps that's where Mutt
shines!

~~~
kqr
You're joking, but it's true. It's the same thing with any poweruser tool,
like Vim and tiling window managers. You can accomplish surprisingly difficult
tasks in just a few keystrokes, but you can also destroy everything just as
easily.

~~~
SZJX
TBH I don't think you can easily destroy things in Vim/Emacs though. As long
as you don't for some reason run it as sudo the security mechanism is quite
robust.

------
scateu
March 8, 2006

Marissa Mayer prefers Pine to Gmail

[mayer]Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience at Google
confesses to CNN Money that she doesn't use Gmail for her business mail.

"I don't feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it. I use Gmail for
my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as
many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast. I use an e-mail
application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college.
It's a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with
Courier fonts. I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday
or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight."

Pine is a mail program developed at the University of Washington. It has a lot
of keyboard shortcuts and countless ways to sort, shuffle, and sift through
your email.

~~~
naner
10 to 14 hours of email? I think I'd pull a Knuth or look for another job,
that's crazy.

~~~
barsonme
I'm sorry -- what do you mean by "pull a Knuth"?

~~~
Tomte
He processes mail by stack: have his secretary print out emails and put them
together with snail mail on a stack. Look at the stack every few months.

Urgent mail is expedited at his secretary's discretion, of course.

~~~
ascagnel_
This requires a secretary (or at least an AI that's able to prioritize as well
as a human). GMail is getting there by filtering out obvious cruft (spam
filtering, flagging as important, moving social and promotional emails into
their own tabs, etc), but falls down in terms of prioritizing non-obvious
cruft.

------
nextos
I use it daily. It's a lovely email client. Close to the Unix ideal of doing
one thing, and doing it well.

Integration with other utilities (notmuch, isync) for indexing and sync'ing is
very easy, thanks to close adherence to Unix principles, and gets you a very
neat setup. Nothing to envy from Gmail.

~~~
yoodenvranx
> Close to the Unix ideal of doing one thing, and doing it well.

In my opinion this concept does not work for most non-cli programs. How do you
actually define this "one thing"?

Is "reading an email" one thing? And "writing an email" another thing? What
about "spellchecking the email"? What about "managing all my email contacts"?
What about "back up my emails"? What about "sign email with GPG"?

Do all of these things really need a separate program?

The unix principle works quite well for stuff like grep/find/awk but there is
just now way you could make GIMP follow the unix principle.

~~~
tomphoolery
> Is "reading an email" one thing?

That's essentially what Mutt does. But you could also use other programs to
parse and read each email file if you wish. "Fetching email" can also be a
different thing. I use offlineimap for that purpose and store my messages in
the Maildir format.

> And "writing an email" another thing?

Yes. Even "sending an email" is another thing. The program that edits my
emails (vim) is not the same program which sends them (msmtp).

> What about "spellchecking the email"?

I don't do this (with a program), but I assume you could just do it within
Vim.

> What about "managing all my email contacts"?

I use OS X Contacts for that, so there's a command-line tool that allows me to
search for and then insert those contacts in Mutt.

> What about "back up my emails"?

Again, another program! I keep my Maildir synchronized to my home server and
all my other computers using BitTorrent Sync. Changes are backed up with Arq
to Amazon Glacier every day.

> What about "sign email with GPG"?

Definitely its own program, although Mutt includes support for it you still
need GPG installed and everything set up for that stuff in order to sign your
emails. This is true for every other email client isn't it? I know I have to
instal GPGMail to get the same functionality on Apple Mail.

So you see, all of these tools are really separate processes in and of
themselves. The benefit to all of this is when newer and better technology
comes around, you don't have to wait for your software vendor to support it.
Instead, you just use a different program that follows the same standards,
which have been around for decades. Some people, probably most, find this to
be an unacceptable burden. For that, there are definitely great email clients
out there like Nylas N1 and Google Inbox...but if you want total control in
the same sense that you get from your shell and your editor, Mutt is the
client for you.

~~~
tambourine_man
I was curious about your setup. Found this:
[https://gist.github.com/4540438](https://gist.github.com/4540438)

But no mention of OS X contacts integration. Care to share how you do it?

~~~
CraigJPerry
One way:
[https://github.com/tgray/contacts/blob/master/README.markdow...](https://github.com/tgray/contacts/blob/master/README.markdown)

------
dannysu
There was a great thread on HN before that motivated me to install mutt:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182582](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182582)

I found this tutorial that I wanted to follow in that thread:
[http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-
mutt/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/)

I do have offlineimap and mutt already setup and I can read emails, but
haven't installed notmuch or done any configuration. Seeing 1.6 release
reminds me that I should give it a fair try again.

------
_wmd
[https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz](https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz) is
another active fork of mutt with a whole bunch of improvements that haven't
made it upstream yet. It's been accepting patches for most of the time mutt
upstream had been asleep (years). For example mbox parsing in mutt-kz is about
50% faster

------
bcully
I'd like to thank mutt's new maintainer, Kevin McCarthy, for pushing mutt 1.6
out the door. It's been a long time coming!

~~~
moonlighter
No kidding! 9 years later..

    
    
      Mutt 1.6.0   was released on April 4, 2016.  
      Mutt 1.4.2.3 was released on June  9, 2007.

~~~
Narishma
I don't think 1.4.2.3 was the last version before this one. The one in the
Ubuntu Wily repositories for example is 1.5.23

~~~
jwilk
To clarify, 1.6 is the first _stable_ release since 1.4.2.3.

1.5.X was a development series.

------
SwellJoe
It's been many years since I've used mutt, but I'm considering going back to
it. For a while, HTML email had become so common that it was uncomfortable to
use a text email client, but that trend seems to have reversed...most of my
business communication is plain text (maybe a shift in the people I interact
with for business). The speed of mutt is damned near impossible to beat, and
the bandwidth usage is so tiny (I can run it on the server, rather than
locally, so only the mails I actually open get transferred). I'm living on the
road again, and mobile internet has gotten incredibly expensive (I spend
approximately $300/month on Internet now, even with very little video and
large downloads), so I've been using a web-based mail client more often
(Usermin, which is one that I work on, so it's an "eat your own dog food"
situation), but it is currently not particularly fast for dealing with
hundreds of emails per day.

~~~
foodstances
Most MUAs these days send multipart/alternative messages, so even though most
recipients see the fancy HTML version, the message also has a text/plain
version that mutt will default to showing and you won't even notice it had an
HTML part.

For those rare HTML-only mails, just install lynx and add this to ~/.mailcap:

    
    
         text/html; lynx -dump -localhost -force_html -width 80 %s; copiousoutput
    

This will make mutt pipe the html content to lynx, which will render it and
spit back a plaintext version with all the embedded links at the bottom.
You'll be able to easily scroll through the message in mutt as though it were
plaintext.

~~~
chjj
For all those who prefer w3m:

    
    
        text/html; /usr/bin/w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html -o display_link_number=1 -dump; copiousoutput

------
shirro
I am a reluctant Mutt user. I prefer it to webmail but I prefer a good native
gui client to either. It is a very flexible solution but is a big investment
in configuration and keypress memory for a casual user. It is a relief to see
it still being developed. So much seems abandoned these days with the bleed to
web and mobile.

~~~
mfincham
Have you tried Sylpheed? It's like mutt for GTK.

[http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/](http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/)

------
kxyvr
Can anyone recommend a CalDAV based calendar program that either integrates
into or works well along side Mutt? I've tried khal and it works alright, but
I recall it being a little wonky with timezones.

~~~
lorenzfx
Timezone wonkeyness should be all fixed, if not, please report in the issue
tracker.

PS: some of khal's wonkiness is due to it reporting all errors instead of
silently ignoring them most other calendar software does.

------
k2enemy
I love mutt and use it as my primary email client. I got too frustrated with
gmail's interface changing all the time and Apple's Mail.app introducing
regressions each release. You can't beat mutt's speed and stability.

I do wish that there was an option to treat threads as the primary unit, like
gmail and sup ([http://supmua.org](http://supmua.org)). The threading support
isn't bad, but expanding and collapsing threads in the index view only gets
you so far. Years ago I took a look at the code base thinking I might give it
a try, but quickly realized that kind of change was a lot of work and way over
my head.

~~~
rveeblefetzer
Gmail's conversation threading, or the Thunderbird Conversations addon, are
the only thing I wish for with Mutt. I once asked on the mutt mailing list
about this, but the solutions were pretty ugly, mostly involving all sent mail
copied in the inbox.

Still, mutt is my main email client. I only started using it a couple of years
ago, after Thunderbird started to strain with my mail folders. In 1990s
college days, I used Pine. Mutt scared me back then, tho mostly because no one
I saw using it then edited with Pico.

------
stevekemp
I was a big mutt-user, but found the scripting a little less flexible than I'd
like.

To keep a similar feel I wrote my own mail client, with integrated Lua. It
might be topical, even with all the mutt-love and nostalgia here:

[https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/](https://github.com/lumail/lumail2/)

[https://lumail.org/](https://lumail.org/)

------
0x0
Since Debian already ships 1.5.23 (or 1.5.24 in testing), here's a list of
changes between each development version leading up to 1.6.0:

[http://www.mutt.org/doc/UPDATING](http://www.mutt.org/doc/UPDATING)

------
dguido
S/MIME and GPG support out of the box, that's amazing!

~~~
luxpir
That's not strictly new in this version. I've had that enabled (hesitate to
say been using) for a while now.

Anyone know if the hanging between wifi to cable connections is resolved yet?
Aside from that I'm much quicker and more productive with my inboxes now.
Sidebar patch, hotkey per mailbox... Very quick icedove replacement.

PS: Workaround for the connection thing is to ctrl-z when it hangs, and fg the
other instance for that connection.

~~~
lemonade
Alternatively, you can use mosh to your homebox, and run mutt from there. Has
some other advantages as well ...

~~~
luxpir
Yeah good call. I have mosh running to various boxes all day, but the mail
sits on 2 diff servers so I tend to bring them together on the local machine.
Still, very doable. Could use tmux and mosh together on the pi even... Yep,
thanks for suggestion.

------
codereflection
Tangent: change logs really should have a date stamp.

------
burke
If you're looking for a changelog from 1.5.24, here it is:
[https://dev.mutt.org/hg/mutt/file/tip/UPDATING](https://dev.mutt.org/hg/mutt/file/tip/UPDATING)

------
a3_nm
For mutt users, a great new feature in this release (technically, in mutt
1.5.24) is crypt_opportunistic_encrypt, which allows you to encrypt your
messages with GPG automatically whenever the recipients also support GPG. See
the manual [http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/#crypt-opportunistic-
encrypt](http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/#crypt-opportunistic-encrypt) and I
also wrote a blogpost with some more details
[https://a3nm.net/blog/mutt_crypt_opportunistic_encrypt.html](https://a3nm.net/blog/mutt_crypt_opportunistic_encrypt.html)

------
rcarmo
Wow, this takes me back. Like someone else posted here, to around 2007 or so,
which is when it was last updated.

Good to have this, although most of what I get these days (work-wise) is HTML-
formatted or otherwise challenging from a readability perspective. I fully
intend to give this a go against my mail archive (which goes back to '98, and
which I currently access via Thunderbird, running inside a VNC server on an
ODROID-U2 ARM board - which is a bit heftier than tmux...)

~~~
nicwest
if you haven't already, have a look at w3m [1] or similar. I use mail cap to
route emails though w3m and it's pretty rare that I notice anything amiss.

`text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html; copiousoutput;`

[1] [http://w3m.sourceforge.net/](http://w3m.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
justinmk
w3m is another project that hasn't seen activity in years. Why do people
recommend it so much more often than lynx[1], which is still in active
development?

[1] [http://lynx.invisible-island.net/](http://lynx.invisible-island.net/)

~~~
mgedmin
w3m renders HTML tables better. Or at least it used to, when I was setting up
my mailcap a long time ago.

For interactive terminal web browsing I prefer links/elinks (again, compared
to lynx/w3m a long time ago).

------
donpdonp
I'm still rocking the (al)pine when I need to read the inbox on a headless/ssh
server.

~~~
ars
I use alpine as my main everyday email client.

I have it integrated with a browser for those annoying HTML emails that it
can't interpret, but it can handle most HTML emails.

~~~
scateu
I also use alpine as my everyday email client.

I think it has some psychologic benefit to help me calm down and read the big
pile of mails.

Alpine is currently maintained by Eduardo Chappa.

I just committed a patch about LDAP. Eduardo Chappa is a very diligent
developer.

------
dfc
Does anyone use Mutt with SMIME and GPG? Do you like it? I need a mailer with
SMIME support for work. I am currently using thunderbird and would love an
alternative.

~~~
gh02t
Out of curiosity, what do you do that requires S/MIME? I once set it up, but
it seemed nobody else was using it and I gave up.

~~~
dublinben
It's used a lot within large organizations. You'd probably never know, because
they tend not to sign messages going outside the organization.

------
BooneJS
I haven't used Mutt in ages, but I'll be installing it tonight. 90% of my mail
is done in Outlook (work) or Mail.app (home). I feel like those 2 applications
have more users than they probably deserve.

------
tremendo
I've been a Mutt fanboy for long now. Ironically seeing this announcement
reminded me to give sup[1] another try. It sounds amazing to me, but when I
tried first I had some issue with installation that I hope I can get past now.
May be reporting on it later…

[1] [http://supmua.org/](http://supmua.org/)

------
mrbill
I've been using Mutt since '98\. Wow.

~~~
143456anon
I moved to mutt in '94, never looked back.

------
fmariluis
Since I'm an Emacs user, I recently switched from mutt to mu4e. It wasn't
difficult, since I recycled most of the mutt setup: offlineimap, msmtp, mu,
and of course the maildir.

Even more, I can still use mutt if I want to. But mu4e is so nicely integrated
with the rest of Emacs that I think I'll keep using it.

------
antman
To display inline images in Mutt [0]. Works only in non transparent terminals.

[0] [http://paul.kuntke.de/blog/2012/07/16/view-images-in-
mutt/](http://paul.kuntke.de/blog/2012/07/16/view-images-in-mutt/)

------
goalieca
I love mutt. It was my main client when I was in school. Now i work for the
man and am stuck with outlook.

~~~
cweagans
In theory, I should be stuck with outlook too, but mutt still works via
Davmail. Highly recommend if you haven't already played with it.

------
cauthon
Can Mutt work with an Exchange account?

~~~
AckSyn
Yes, but it'll take the admin to enable those resources.

[https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/jj657728%28v=exc...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/jj657728%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx)

"By default, POP3 and IMAP4 are disabled in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013. To
support POP3 clients that still rely on these protocols, you need to start two
POP3 services: the Microsoft Exchange POP3 service and the Microsoft Exchange
POP3 Backend service. To support IMAP4 clients that still rely on these
protocols, you need to start two IMAP4 services: the Microsoft Exchange IMAP4
service and the Microsoft Exchange IMAP4 Backend service."

~~~
copperx
That's terrible; the admins at my job would take a million years to enable the
resources.

One workaround is to forward all your emails to a IMAP-friendly service such
as Fastmail using Exchange rules.

~~~
jamespo
for a lot of companies doing that would be a big no-no security wise

------
novel
Mutt is a very nice MUA that I use daily. The only thing that is bugging me is
its slowness when working with large mailboxes.

Opening an IMAP mailbox with 100.000+ messages takes 60-90 seconds. And
caching does not make things much faster. :(

------
xufi
Awesome I wanted to get into Mutt but haven't had time to set it up

------
profeta
most desktop clients (mutt included) almost died when everyone moved to gmail
and such. imap/pop access was too expensive (when compared to having a so-so
UI for free) or not available.

now that gmail and yahoomail give imap for free, they will surely comeback.
see N1 for example.

~~~
adrusi
Pretty sure gmail supported POP from day one, and it has supported IMAP since
2007 [1]. The problem is that gmail's mail organizational system is sort of
incompatible with POP/IMAP and completely incompatible with a number of
clients. That started to change around 2010 when gmail had been so popular for
so long that the standards and clients started to accomodate gmail's way of
doing things.

Desktop MUAs won't suddenly become popular now. A generation of users has been
brought up on webmail, and the idea of using a separate program for email on
the desktop isn't familiar to them.

[1]
[http://www.wired.com/2007/10/google_adds_imap_support_to_gma...](http://www.wired.com/2007/10/google_adds_imap_support_to_gmail/)

~~~
qznc
I think the main thing is that people see no difference between gmail and
other web messaging (eg Facebook) anymore. It's a text box on a website.

~~~
mastazi
I completely agree. Just during the last 24 hours I've heard someone
repeatedly using expressions like "I've sent you a Gmail" or "Yes, you can
send a message from Outlook to Gmail". As if Gmail was just another messaging
service, along the lines of Whatsapp, WeChat or Line.

The person in question is someone who became "computer literate" relatively
recently (at least compared to me, I'm 37 and always been tinkering since I
was a kid) and has become accustomed to most on-line services while using
smartphones and tablets, not a personal computer.

That person is not alone. To be honest, I think most people under 20 and most
people living in developing countries went down a similar path (mobile first)
and have a similar understanding of messaging platform.

------
ank_the_elder
Whatever happened with mutt-ng? I haven't used mutt in a long, long time.

------
raimue
The page footer:

    
    
      Last updated on November 30, 2001 by Jeremy Blosser.
    

My first thought was, why is such an old changelog trending?

------
sengork
This certainly brings back memories. I've all but forgotten about Mutt,
however instantly recognised it when I saw the post.

------
jbmorgado
I really tired of having to use a browser to access my main email (Gmail
inbox) and even worst to have to use another and different email program
(Apple Mail) to access my other email addresses (I have few emails on those
ones).

I look at Mutt willingly once about every 3 months, but then I'm always put
down because of the last of Snoozing (that I've know off). I rely heavily on
Snoozing in my main account to order my tasks.

Is there any workflow with mutt that achieves a similar workflow where I can
postpone emails to a later date?

