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 systems. It was originally written by Michael Elkins in 1995 and released under the
GNU General Public License 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 Fifth Edition Unix.
All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single f ...
and
Maildir
The Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing email messages in which each message is stored in a separate file with a unique name, and each mail folder is a file system directory. The local file system handles file locking as messages are ...
) and protocols (
POP3,
IMAP, etc.). It also includes
MIME support, notably full
PGP/
GPG and
S/MIME integration.
Mutt was originally designed as a
Mail User Agent (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 the ...
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 typica ...
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
computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...
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
The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the Univ ...
support.
Mutt is fully controlled with the keyboard, and has support for mail
conversation threading
Conversation threading is a feature used by many email clients, bulletin boards, newsgroups, and Internet forums in which the software aids the user by visually grouping messages with their replies. These groups are called a conversation, topi ...
, meaning one can easily move around long discussions such as in
mailing lists
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is re ...
. New messages are composed with an external
text editor, unlike
pine, which embeds its own editor known as
pico
Pico may refer to:
Places The Moon
* Mons Pico, a lunar mountain in the northern part of the Mare Imbrium basin
Portugal
* Pico, a civil parish in the municipality of Vila Verde
* Pico da Pedra, a civil parish in the municipality of Ribe ...
.
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 via a
Bash script
Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions. Bash ...
.
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 or extract data from an environment. Keeping the attack surface as small a ...
compared with other clients that ship with a
web browser rendering engine or a
JavaScript interpreter.
In relation to
Transport Layer Security, Mutt can be configured to
trust certificates on first use, and not to use older, less secure versions of the
Transport Layer Security protocol.
See also
*
Comparison of email clients
The following tables compare general and technical features of notable email client programs.
General
Basic general information about the clients: creator/company, O/S, licence, & interface. Clients listed on a light purple background are no long ...
*
Text-based email client
A text-based email client is an email client with its user interface being text-based, occupying a whole terminal screen. Other kind of email clients are GUI-based (cf. email client) or Web-based, see Webmail.
Text-based email clients may be ...
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
Software that uses ncurses
Software that uses S-Lang
MacOS email clients
Console applications