Sample muttrc file

You will be prompted to provide a name. After selecting the file, you are again dropped to the review screen. Now, under Attachment, two files are listed. The procedure for replying to a message is similar to the one used for creating a new mail. Try sending a message to yourself. You should see in the sender field username localhost.

To configure Mutt, you need to create a. Read the sample. To send mail using Mutt, your. A basic. In addition to sending and receiving messages, you may be filtering email with Procmail.

If your filters send messages to mailboxes other than the inbox, you need to tell Mutt about which mailboxes you have.

It took some trial and error, but it was a rewarding experience. If you're using 2-factor authentication and you certainly should , you'll need to use an app password for Gmail, Outlook, etc to login. Let's add the URL for the account. We'll need a folder to download your mails from your inbox. Without this, Mutt cannot function. So add the following command to the config. You may have noticed that mutt takes a long time to start up fetching message headers. To reduce this, you can set up the cache using the command.

Try running mutt again and it should start instantly, because the cache has been stored locally. Similarly, you can define more settings for the Sent, Drafts folders, etc.

The menu bar at the top of the window lets you navigate between various tabs. The large pane in the center is the message viewer pane. You will see the mails that're in your inbox along with the date, name of the sender and email subject. Highlight a message use the arrow keys , and press enter to view the message. Mutt does not have an email composer built-in, so you'll need to use a text editor.

You can use advanced ones like Vim, emacs, or stick to the basic editors. It's up to you to create it and configure it.

Mutt won't create it for you. With no configuration file, you just get the mail on your local machine if you have local mail set up, which is not the case on Ubuntu by default. You will probably want a few additional settings, including:. Note that for Gmail you'll need to either set up a per-application password preferred or enable plain IMAP access. Looking around I find a surprising number of incomplete tutorials.

There's a lot of information in the Arch wiki , as usual, but it's a bit hard to digest. I'll try to be complete here but I don't actually use Mutt for Gmail so this is untested, comments welcome. Assuming that your Gmail address is johndoe gmail. If you don't want to keep your password in your configuration file, see Mutt: how to safely store password? Mutt is a bit awkward when it comes to having multiple accounts.

The way it works is, you put all the commands to configure each account in hooks. When you switch from one account to another, Mutt runs the hook commands. The alternates and mailboxes settings are a list that should contain one entry per account. Alternatively, use a separate configuration file for each account. It's less convenient but simpler. Alternatively, use OfflineIMAP to retrieve email from all your accounts, and use Mutt purely locally except for sending.

Times have changed somewhat and the rise of the gui email clients, the arrival of IMAP access to Gmail and the lack of interest by many Linux users in digging too deep have all contributed to a drop in interest in a page which still proposes this 'old school' approach! However I am not in this business to achieve high page rankings, the aim of this page is to show that an old school approach to accessing the Gmail servers with a collection of high quality Linux utilities still has a place.

Certainly I have been using variations of the techniques described on this page to collect my email for over a decade now. And now, if you are interested Gentle Reader, I will show you how you can do it too! In sequence there are four applications that need to be installed and appropriately configured to download the mail, sort it, read it and then send a reply via Gmail.

But first some settings will have to be made via the Gmail gui. Log in using the gui interface and ferret out the following settings:. For a very long period of time I used Fetchmail to collect my mail from Gmail but now in late I can see that there has not been a new release of Fetchmail in 6 years, April 23rd When I looked for alternatives I realised that Charles Cazabon's getmail not only has a fairly amazing vintage with the first release in but a recent release in early So I took it for a whirl and I have been very happy with it and as a bonus getmail is installed as part of a full Slackware installation.