1 <!doctype linuxdoc system>
5 <title>The Mutt E-Mail Client
6 <author>by Michael Elkins <htmlurl url="mailto:me@cs.hmc.edu" name="<me@cs.hmc.edu>">
7 <date>version @VERSION@
9 ``All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.'' -me, circa 1995
16 <bf/Mutt/ is a small but very powerful text-based MIME mail client. Mutt is
17 highly configurable, and is well suited to the mail power user with advanced
18 features like key bindings, keyboard macros, mail threading, regular
19 expression searches and a powerful pattern matching language for selecting
24 <htmlurl url="http://www.mutt.org/"
25 name="http://www.mutt.org/">
29 To subscribe to one of the following mailing lists, send a message with the
30 word <em/subscribe/ in the body to
31 <tt/list-name/<em/-request/<tt/@mutt.org/.
34 <item><htmlurl url="mailto:mutt-announce-request@mutt.org"
35 name="mutt-announce@mutt.org"> -- low traffic list for announcements
36 <item><htmlurl url="mailto:mutt-users-request@mutt.org"
37 name="mutt-users@mutt.org"> -- help, bug reports and feature requests
38 <item><htmlurl url="mailto:mutt-dev-request@mutt.org" name="mutt-dev@mutt.org"> -- development mailing list
41 <bf/Note:/ all messages posted to <em/mutt-announce/ are automatically
42 forwarded to <em/mutt-users/, so you do not need to be subscribed to both
45 <sect1>Software Distribution Sites
48 <item><htmlurl url="ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/"
49 name="ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/">
52 For a list of mirror sites, please refer to <htmlurl
53 url="http://www.mutt.org/download.html"
54 name="http://www.mutt.org/download.html">.
58 Visit channel <em/#mutt/ on <htmlurl
59 url="http://www.freenode.net/" name="irc.freenode.net
60 (www.freenode.net)"> to chat with other people interested in Mutt.
64 See the newsgroup <htmlurl url="news:comp.mail.mutt" name="comp.mail.mutt">.
68 Mutt is Copyright (C) 1996-2000 Michael R. Elkins
69 <me@cs.hmc.edu> and others
71 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
72 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
73 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
74 (at your option) any later version.
76 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
77 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
78 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
79 GNU General Public License for more details.
81 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
82 along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
83 Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
88 This section is intended as a brief overview of how to use Mutt. There are
89 many other features which are described elsewhere in the manual. There
90 is even more information available in the Mutt FAQ and various web
91 pages. See the <htmlurl url="http://www.mutt.org/mutt/"
92 name="Mutt Page"> for more details.
94 The keybindings described in this section are the defaults as distributed.
95 Your local system administrator may have altered the defaults for your site.
96 You can always type ``?'' in any menu to display the current bindings.
98 The first thing you need to do is invoke mutt, simply by typing mutt
99 at the command line. There are various command-line options, see
100 either the mutt man page or the <ref id="commandline" name="reference">.
102 <sect1>Moving Around in Menus
105 Information is presented in menus, very similar to ELM. Here is a table
106 showing the common keys used to navigate menus in Mutt.
109 j or Down next-entry move to the next entry
110 k or Up previous-entry move to the previous entry
111 z or PageDn page-down go to the next page
112 Z or PageUp page-up go to the previous page
113 = or Home first-entry jump to the first entry
114 * or End last-entry jump to the last entry
115 q quit exit the current menu
116 ? help list all keybindings for the current menu
119 <sect1>Editing Input Fields<label id="editing">
121 Mutt has a builtin line editor which is used as the primary way to input
122 textual data such as email addresses or filenames. The keys used to move
123 around while editing are very similar to those of Emacs.
126 ^A or <Home> bol move to the start of the line
127 ^B or <Left> backward-char move back one char
128 Esc B backward-word move back one word
129 ^D or <Delete> delete-char delete the char under the cursor
130 ^E or <End> eol move to the end of the line
131 ^F or <Right> forward-char move forward one char
132 Esc F forward-word move forward one word
133 <Tab> complete complete filename or alias
134 ^T complete-query complete address with query
135 ^K kill-eol delete to the end of the line
136 ESC d kill-eow delete to the end ot the word
137 ^W kill-word kill the word in front of the cursor
138 ^U kill-line delete entire line
139 ^V quote-char quote the next typed key
140 <Up> history-up recall previous string from history
141 <Down> history-down recall next string from history
142 <BackSpace> backspace kill the char in front of the cursor
143 Esc u upcase-word convert word to upper case
144 Esc l downcase-word convert word to lower case
145 Esc c capitalize-word capitalize the word
147 <Return> n/a finish editing
150 You can remap the <em/editor/ functions using the <ref id="bind" name="bind">
151 command. For example, to make the <em/Delete/ key delete the character in
152 front of the cursor rather than under, you could use
154 <tt/bind editor <delete> backspace/
156 <sect1>Reading Mail - The Index and Pager
159 Similar to many other mail clients, there are two modes in which mail is
160 read in Mutt. The first is the index of messages in the mailbox, which is
161 called the ``index'' in Mutt. The second mode is the display of the
162 message contents. This is called the ``pager.''
164 The next few sections describe the functions provided in each of these
167 <sect2>The Message Index
171 c change to a different mailbox
172 ESC c change to a folder in read-only mode
173 C copy the current message to another mailbox
174 ESC C decode a message and copy it to a folder
175 ESC s decode a message and save it to a folder
176 D delete messages matching a pattern
177 d delete the current message
179 l show messages matching a pattern
180 N mark message as new
181 o change the current sort method
182 O reverse sort the mailbox
183 q save changes and exit
185 T tag messages matching a pattern
186 t toggle the tag on a message
187 ESC t toggle tag on entire message thread
188 U undelete messages matching a pattern
191 x abort changes and exit
192 <Return> display-message
193 <Tab> jump to the next new message
194 @ show the author's full e-mail address
195 $ save changes to mailbox
198 ^L clear and redraw the screen
199 ^T untag messages matching a pattern
205 In addition to who sent the message and the subject, a short summary of
206 the disposition of each message is printed beside the message number.
207 Zero or more of the following ``flags'' may appear, which mean:
211 <tag/D/ message is deleted (is marked for deletion)
212 <tag/d/ message have attachments marked for deletion
213 <tag/K/ contains a PGP public key
214 <tag/N/ message is new
215 <tag/O/ message is old
216 <tag/P/ message is PGP encrypted
217 <tag/r/ message has been replied to
218 <tag/S/ message is signed, and the signature is succesfully verified
219 <tag/s/ message is signed
220 <tag/!/ message is flagged
221 <tag/*/ message is tagged
224 Some of the status flags can be turned on or off using
226 <item><bf/set-flag/ (default: w)
227 <item><bf/clear-flag/ (default: W)
231 Furthermore, the following flags reflect who the message is addressed
232 to. They can be customized with the
233 <ref id="to_chars" name="$to_chars"> variable.
237 <tag/+/ message is to you and you only
238 <tag/T/ message is to you, but also to or cc'ed to others
239 <tag/C/ message is cc'ed to you
240 <tag/F/ message is from you
241 <tag/L/ message is sent to a subscribed mailing list
247 By default, Mutt uses its builtin pager to display the body of messages.
248 The pager is very similar to the Unix program <em/less/ though not nearly as
252 <Return> go down one line
253 <Space> display the next page (or next message if at the end of a message)
254 - go back to the previous page
255 n search for next match
256 S skip beyond quoted text
257 T toggle display of quoted text
259 / search for a regular expression (pattern)
260 ESC / search backwards for a regular expression
261 \ toggle search pattern coloring
262 ^ jump to the top of the message
265 In addition, many of the functions from the <em/index/ are available in
266 the pager, such as <em/delete-message/ or <em/copy-message/ (this is one
267 advantage over using an external pager to view messages).
269 Also, the internal pager supports a couple other advanced features. For
270 one, it will accept and translate the ``standard'' nroff sequences for
271 bold and underline. These sequences are a series of either the letter,
272 backspace (^H), the letter again for bold or the letter, backspace,
273 ``_'' for denoting underline. Mutt will attempt to display these
274 in bold and underline respectively if your terminal supports them. If
275 not, you can use the bold and underline <ref id="color" name="color">
276 objects to specify a color or mono attribute for them.
278 Additionally, the internal pager supports the ANSI escape sequences for
279 character attributes. Mutt translates them into the correct color and
280 character settings. The sequences Mutt supports are:
284 ESC [ Ps;Ps;Ps;...;Ps m
291 3x Foreground color is x
292 4x Background color is x
305 Mutt uses these attributes for handling text/enriched messages, and they
306 can also be used by an external <ref id="auto_view" name="autoview">
307 script for highlighting purposes. <bf/Note:/ If you change the colors for your
308 display, for example by changing the color associated with color2 for
309 your xterm, then that color will be used instead of green.
311 <sect2>Threaded Mode<label id="threads">
313 When the mailbox is <ref id="sort" name="sorted"> by <em/threads/, there are
314 a few additional functions available in the <em/index/ and <em/pager/ modes.
317 ^D delete-thread delete all messages in the current thread
318 ^U undelete-thread undelete all messages in the current thread
319 ^N next-thread jump to the start of the next thread
320 ^P previous-thread jump to the start of the previous thread
321 ^R read-thread mark the current thread as read
322 ESC d delete-subthread delete all messages in the current subthread
323 ESC u undelete-subthread undelete all messages in the current subthread
324 ESC n next-subthread jump to the start of the next subthread
325 ESC p previous-subthread jump to the start of the previous subthread
326 ESC r read-subthread mark the current subthread as read
327 ESC t tag-thread toggle the tag on the current thread
328 ESC v collapse-thread toggle collapse for the current thread
329 ESC V collapse-all toggle collapse for all threads
330 P parent-message jump to parent message in thread
333 <bf/Note:/ Collapsing a thread displays only the first message
334 in the thread and hides the others. This is useful when threads
335 contain so many messages that you can only see a handful of threads on
336 the screen. See %M in <ref id="index_format"name="$index_format">.
337 For example, you could use "%?M?(#%03M)&(%4l)?" in <ref
338 id="index_format"name="$index_format"> to optionally
339 display the number of hidden messages if the thread is collapsed.
341 See also: <ref id="strict_threads" name="$strict_threads">.
343 <sect2>Miscellaneous Functions
344 <p><bf/create-alias/<label id="create-alias"> (default: a)<newline>
346 Creates a new alias based upon the current message (or prompts for a
347 new one). Once editing is complete, an <ref id="alias" name="alias">
348 command is added to the file specified by the <ref id="alias_file"
349 name="$alias_file"> variable for future use. <bf/Note:/
350 Specifying an <ref id="alias_file" name="$alias_file">
351 does not add the aliases specified there-in, you must also <ref
352 id="source" name="source"> the file.
354 <p><bf/check-traditional-pgp/<label id="check-traditional-pgp"> (default: ESC P)<newline>
356 This function will search the current message for content signed or
357 encrypted with PGP the "traditional" way, that is, without proper
358 MIME tagging. Technically, this function will temporarily change
359 the MIME content types of the body parts containing PGP data; this
360 is similar to the <ref id="edit-type" name="edit-type"> function's
364 <p><bf/display-toggle-weed/<label id="display-toggle-weed"> (default: h)<newline>
366 Toggles the weeding of message header fields specified by <ref id="ignore"
367 name="ignore"> commands.
369 <p><bf/edit/<label id="edit"> (default: e)<newline>
371 This command (available in the ``index'' and ``pager'') allows you to
372 edit the raw current message as it's present in the mail folder.
373 After you have finished editing, the changed message will be
374 appended to the current folder, and the original message will be
377 <p><bf/edit-type/<label id="edit-type"><newline>
378 (default: ^E on the attachment menu, and in the pager and index menus; ^T on the
381 This command is used to temporarily edit an attachment's content
382 type to fix, for instance, bogus character set parameters. When
383 invoked from the index or from the pager, you'll have the
384 opportunity to edit the top-level attachment's content type. On the
385 <ref id="attach_menu" name="attachment menu">, you can change any
386 attachment's content type. These changes are not persistent, and get
387 lost upon changing folders.
389 Note that this command is also available on the <ref
390 id="compose_menu" name="compose menu">. There, it's used to
391 fine-tune the properties of attachments you are going to send.
393 <p><bf/enter-command/<label id="enter-command"> (default: ``:'')<newline>
395 This command is used to execute any command you would normally put in a
396 configuration file. A common use is to check the settings of variables, or
397 in conjunction with <ref id="macro" name="macros"> to change settings on the
400 <p><bf/extract-keys/<label id="extract-keys"> (default: ^K)<newline>
402 This command extracts PGP public keys from the current or tagged
403 message(s) and adds them to your PGP public key ring.
405 <p><bf/forget-passphrase/<label id="forget-passphrase"> (default:
408 This command wipes the passphrase(s) from memory. It is useful, if
409 you misspelled the passphrase.
411 <p><bf/list-reply/<label id="list-reply"> (default: L)<newline>
413 Reply to the current or tagged message(s) by extracting any addresses which
414 match the regular expressions given by the <ref id="lists" name="lists or subscribe">
415 commands, but also honor any <tt/Mail-Followup-To/ header(s) if the
416 <ref id="honor_followup_to" name="$honor_followup_to">
417 configuration variable is set. Using this when replying to messages posted
418 to mailing lists helps avoid duplicate copies being sent to the author of
419 the message you are replying to.
421 <bf/pipe-message/<label id="pipe-message"> (default: |)<newline>
423 Asks for an external Unix command and pipes the current or
424 tagged message(s) to it. The variables <ref id="pipe_decode"
425 name="$pipe_decode">, <ref id="pipe_split"
426 name="$pipe_split">, <ref id="pipe_sep"
427 name="$pipe_sep"> and <ref id="wait_key"
428 name="$wait_key"> control the exact behaviour of this
431 <bf/resend-message/<label id="resend-message"> (default: ESC e)<newline>
433 With resend-message, mutt takes the current message as a template for a
434 new message. This function is best described as "recall from arbitrary
435 folders". It can conveniently be used to forward MIME messages while
436 preserving the original mail structure. Note that the amount of headers
437 included here depends on the value of the <ref id="weed" name="$weed">
440 This function is also available from the attachment menu. You can use this
441 to easily resend a message which was included with a bounce message
442 as a message/rfc822 body part.
444 <bf/shell-escape/<label id="shell-escape"> (default: !)<newline>
446 Asks for an external Unix command and executes it. The <ref
447 id="wait_key" name="$wait_key"> can be used to control
448 whether Mutt will wait for a key to be pressed when the command returns
449 (presumably to let the user read the output of the command), based on
450 the return status of the named command.
452 <bf/toggle-quoted/<label id="toggle-quoted"> (default: T)<newline>
454 The <em/pager/ uses the <ref id="quote_regexp"
455 name="$quote_regexp"> variable to detect quoted text when
456 displaying the body of the message. This function toggles the display
457 of the quoted material in the message. It is particularly useful when
458 are interested in just the response and there is a large amount of
459 quoted text in the way.
461 <bf/skip-quoted/<label id="skip-quoted"> (default: S)<newline>
463 This function will go to the next line of non-quoted text which come
464 after a line of quoted text in the internal pager.
469 The following bindings are available in the <em/index/ for sending
473 m compose compose a new message
474 r reply reply to sender
475 g group-reply reply to all recipients
476 L list-reply reply to mailing list address
477 f forward forward message
478 b bounce bounce (remail) message
479 ESC k mail-key mail a PGP public key to someone
482 Bouncing a message sends the message as is to the recipient you
483 specify. Forwarding a message allows you to add comments or
484 modify the message you are forwarding. These items are discussed
485 in greater detail in the next chapter <ref id="forwarding_mail"
486 name="``Forwarding and Bouncing Mail''">.
488 Mutt will then enter the <em/compose/ menu and prompt you for the
489 recipients to place on the ``To:'' header field. Next, it will ask
490 you for the ``Subject:'' field for the message, providing a default if
491 you are replying to or forwarding a message. See also <ref id="askcc"
492 name="$askcc">, <ref id="askbcc" name="$askbcc">, <ref
493 id="autoedit" name="$autoedit">, <ref id="bounce"
494 name="$bounce">, and <ref id="fast_reply"
495 name="$fast_reply"> for changing how Mutt asks these
498 Mutt will then automatically start your <ref id="editor"
499 name="$editor"> on the message body. If the <ref id="edit_headers"
500 name="$edit_headers"> variable is set, the headers will be at
501 the top of the message in your editor. Any messages you are replying
502 to will be added in sort order to the message, with appropriate <ref
503 id="attribution" name="$attribution">, <ref id="indent_string"
504 name="$indent_string"> and <ref id="post_indent_string"
505 name="$post_indent_string">. When forwarding a
506 message, if the <ref id="mime_forward" name="$mime_forward">
507 variable is unset, a copy of the forwarded message will be included. If
508 you have specified a <ref id="signature" name="$signature">, it
509 will be appended to the message.
511 Once you have finished editing the body of your mail message, you are
512 returned to the <em/compose/ menu. The following options are available:
515 a attach-file attach a file
516 A attach-message attach message(s) to the message
517 ESC k attach-key attach a PGP public key
518 d edit-description edit description on attachment
519 D detach-file detach a file
520 t edit-to edit the To field
521 ESC f edit-from edit the From field
522 r edit-reply-to edit the Reply-To field
523 c edit-cc edit the Cc field
524 b edit-bcc edit the Bcc field
525 y send-message send the message
526 s edit-subject edit the Subject
527 S smime-menu select S/MIME options
528 f edit-fcc specify an ``Fcc'' mailbox
529 p pgp-menu select PGP options
530 P postpone-message postpone this message until later
531 q quit quit (abort) sending the message
532 w write-fcc write the message to a folder
533 i ispell check spelling (if available on your system)
534 ^F forget-passphrase wipe passphrase(s) from memory
537 <bf/Note:/ The attach-message function will prompt you for a folder to
538 attach messages from. You can now tag messages in that folder and they
539 will be attached to the message you are sending. Note that certain
540 operations like composing a new mail, replying, forwarding, etc. are
541 not permitted when you are in that folder. The %r in <ref
542 id="status_format" name="$status_format"> will change to
543 a 'A' to indicate that you are in attach-message mode.
545 <sect2>Editing the message header
547 When editing the header of your outgoing message, there are a couple of
548 special features available.
550 If you specify<newline>
551 <tt/Fcc:/ <em/filename/<newline>
552 Mutt will pick up <em/filename/
553 just as if you had used the <em/edit-fcc/ function in the <em/compose/ menu.
555 You can also attach files to your message by specifying<newline>
556 <tt/Attach:/ <em/filename/ [ <em/description/ ]<newline>
557 where <em/filename/ is the file to attach and <em/description/ is an
558 optional string to use as the description of the attached file.
560 When replying to messages, if you remove the <em/In-Reply-To:/ field from
561 the header field, Mutt will not generate a <em/References:/ field, which
562 allows you to create a new message thread.
564 Also see <ref id="edit_headers" name="edit_headers">.
566 <sect2>Using Mutt with PGP
569 If you want to use PGP, you can specify
571 <tt/Pgp:/ [ <tt/E/ | <tt/S/ | <tt/S/<em/<id>/ ] <newline>
573 ``E'' encrypts, ``S'' signs and
574 ``S<id>'' signs with the given key, setting <ref
575 id="pgp_sign_as" name="$pgp_sign_as"> permanently.
577 If you have told mutt to PGP encrypt a message, it will guide you
578 through a key selection process when you try to send the message.
579 Mutt will not ask you any questions about keys which have a
580 certified user ID matching one of the message recipients' mail
581 addresses. However, there may be situations in which there are
582 several keys, weakly certified user ID fields, or where no matching
585 In these cases, you are dropped into a menu with a list of keys from
586 which you can select one. When you quit this menu, or mutt can't
587 find any matching keys, you are prompted for a user ID. You can, as
588 usually, abort this prompt using <tt/^G/. When you do so, mutt will
589 return to the compose screen.
591 Once you have successfully finished the key selection, the message
592 will be encrypted using the selected public keys, and sent out.
594 Most fields of the entries in the key selection menu (see also <ref
595 id="pgp_entry_format" name="$pgp_entry_format">)
596 have obvious meanings. But some explanations on the capabilities, flags,
597 and validity fields are in order.
599 The flags sequence (%f) will expand to one of the following flags:
601 R The key has been revoked and can't be used.
602 X The key is expired and can't be used.
603 d You have marked the key as disabled.
604 c There are unknown critical self-signature
608 The capabilities field (%c) expands to a two-character sequence
609 representing a key's capabilities. The first character gives
610 the key's encryption capabilities: A minus sign (<bf/-/) means
611 that the key cannot be used for encryption. A dot (<bf/./) means that
612 it's marked as a signature key in one of the user IDs, but may
613 also be used for encryption. The letter <bf/e/ indicates that
614 this key can be used for encryption.
616 The second character indicates the key's signing capabilities. Once
617 again, a ``<bf/-/'' implies ``not for signing'', ``<bf/./'' implies
618 that the key is marked as an encryption key in one of the user-ids, and
619 ``<bf/s/'' denotes a key which can be used for signing.
621 Finally, the validity field (%t) indicates how well-certified a user-id
622 is. A question mark (<bf/?/) indicates undefined validity, a minus
623 character (<bf/-/) marks an untrusted association, a space character
624 means a partially trusted association, and a plus character (<bf/+/)
625 indicates complete validity.
627 <sect2>Sending anonymous messages via mixmaster.
630 You may also have configured mutt to co-operate with Mixmaster, an
631 anonymous remailer. Mixmaster permits you to send your messages
632 anonymously using a chain of remailers. Mixmaster support in mutt is for
633 mixmaster version 2.04 (beta 45 appears to be the latest) and 2.03.
634 It does not support earlier versions or the later so-called version 3 betas,
635 of which the latest appears to be called 2.9b23.
637 To use it, you'll have to obey certain restrictions. Most
638 important, you cannot use the <tt/Cc/ and <tt/Bcc/ headers. To tell
639 Mutt to use mixmaster, you have to select a remailer chain, using
640 the mix function on the compose menu.
642 The chain selection screen is divided into two parts. In the
643 (larger) upper part, you get a list of remailers you may use. In
644 the lower part, you see the currently selected chain of remailers.
646 You can navigate in the chain using the <tt/chain-prev/ and
647 <tt/chain-next/ functions, which are by default bound to the left
648 and right arrows and to the <tt/h/ and <tt/l/ keys (think vi
649 keyboard bindings). To insert a remailer at the current chain
650 position, use the <tt/insert/ function. To append a remailer behind
651 the current chain position, use <tt/select-entry/ or <tt/append/.
652 You can also delete entries from the chain, using the corresponding
653 function. Finally, to abandon your changes, leave the menu, or
654 <tt/accept/ them pressing (by default) the <tt/Return/ key.
656 Note that different remailers do have different capabilities,
657 indicated in the %c entry of the remailer menu lines (see
658 <ref id="mix_entry_format"
659 name="$mix_entry_format">). Most important is
660 the ``middleman'' capability, indicated by a capital ``M'': This
661 means that the remailer in question cannot be used as the final
662 element of a chain, but will only forward messages to other
663 mixmaster remailers. For details on the other capabilities, please
664 have a look at the mixmaster documentation.
666 <sect1>Forwarding and Bouncing Mail<label id="forwarding_mail">
669 Bouncing and forwarding let you send an existing message to recipients
670 that you specify. Bouncing a message uses the <ref id="sendmail"
671 name="sendmail"> command to send a copy to alternative addresses as if
672 they were the message's original recipients. Forwarding a message, on
673 the other hand, allows you to modify the message before it is resent
674 (for example, by adding your own comments).
676 The following keys are bound by default:
679 f forward forward message
680 b bounce bounce (remail) message
683 Forwarding can be done by including the original message in the new
684 message's body (surrounded by indicating lines) or including it as a MIME
685 attachment, depending on the value of the <ref id="mime_forward"
686 name="$mime_forward"> variable. Decoding of attachments,
687 like in the pager, can be controlled by the <ref id="forward_decode"
688 name="$forward_decode"> and <ref id="mime_forward_decode"
689 name="$mime_forward_decode"> variables,
690 respectively. The desired forwarding format may depend on the content,
691 therefore <em/$mime_forward/ is a quadoption which, for
692 example, can be set to ``ask-no''.
694 The inclusion of headers is controlled by the current setting of the
695 <ref id="weed" name="$weed"> variable, unless <ref
696 id="mime_forward" name="mime_forward"> is set.
698 Editing the message to forward follows the same procedure as sending or
699 replying to a message does.
701 <sect1>Postponing Mail<label id="postponing_mail">
704 At times it is desirable to delay sending a message that you have
705 already begun to compose. When the <em/postpone-message/ function is
706 used in the <em/compose/ menu, the body of your message and attachments
707 are stored in the mailbox specified by the <ref id="postponed"
708 name="$postponed"> variable. This means that you can recall the
709 message even if you exit Mutt and then restart it at a later time.
711 Once a message is postponed, there are several ways to resume it. From the
712 command line you can use the ``-p'' option, or if you <em/compose/ a new
713 message from the <em/index/ or <em/pager/ you will be prompted if postponed
714 messages exist. If multiple messages are currently postponed, the
715 <em/postponed/ menu will pop up and you can select which message you would
718 <bf/Note:/ If you postpone a reply to a message, the reply setting of
719 the message is only updated when you actually finish the message and
720 send it. Also, you must be in the same folder with the message you
721 replied to for the status of the message to be updated.
723 See also the <ref id="postpone" name="$postpone"> quad-option.
725 <sect1>Reading news via NNTP<label id="reading_news">
728 If compiled with ``--enable-nntp'' option, Mutt can read news from newsserver
729 via NNTP. You can open a newsgroup with function ``change-newsgroup''
730 (default: i). Default newsserver can be obtained from <em/NNTPSERVER/
731 environment variable. Like other news readers, info about subscribed
732 newsgroups is saved in file by <ref id="newsrc" name="$newsrc">
733 variable. Article headers are cached and can be loaded from file when
734 newsgroup entered instead loading from newsserver.
739 While the default configuration (or ``preferences'') make Mutt
740 usable right out of the box, it is often desirable to tailor Mutt to
741 suit your own tastes. When Mutt is first invoked, it will attempt to
742 read the ``system'' configuration file (defaults set by your local
743 system administrator), unless the ``-n'' <ref id="commandline"
744 name="command line"> option is specified. This file is typically
745 <tt>/usr/local/share/mutt/Muttrc</tt> or <tt>/etc/Muttrc</tt>. Mutt
746 will next look for a file named <tt>.muttrc</tt> in your home
747 directory. If this file does not exist and your home directory has
748 a subdirectory named <tt/.mutt/, mutt try to load a file named
749 <tt>.mutt/muttrc</tt>.
751 <tt>.muttrc</tt> is the file where you will usually place your <ref
752 id="commands" name="commands"> to configure Mutt.
754 In addition, mutt supports version specific configuration files that are
755 parsed instead of the default files as explained above. For instance, if
756 your system has a <tt/Muttrc-0.88/ file in the system configuration
757 directory, and you are running version 0.88 of mutt, this file will be
758 sourced instead of the <tt/Muttrc/ file. The same is true of the user
759 configuration file, if you have a file <tt/.muttrc-0.88.6/ in your home
760 directory, when you run mutt version 0.88.6, it will source this file
761 instead of the default <tt/.muttrc/ file. The version number is the
762 same which is visible using the ``-v'' <ref id="commandline"
763 name="command line"> switch or using the <tt/show-version/ key (default:
764 V) from the index menu.
766 <sect1>Syntax of Initialization Files<label id="muttrc-syntax">
769 An initialization file consists of a series of <ref id="commands"
770 name="commands">. Each line of the file may contain one or more commands.
771 When multiple commands are used, they must be separated by a semicolon (;).
773 set realname='Mutt user' ; ignore x-
775 The hash mark, or pound sign
776 (``#''), is used as a ``comment'' character. You can use it to
777 annotate your initialization file. All text after the comment character
778 to the end of the line is ignored. For example,
781 my_hdr X-Disclaimer: Why are you listening to me? # This is a comment
784 Single quotes (') and double quotes (&dquot;) can be used to quote strings
785 which contain spaces or other special characters. The difference between
786 the two types of quotes is similar to that of many popular shell programs,
787 namely that a single quote is used to specify a literal string (one that is
788 not interpreted for shell variables or quoting with a backslash [see
789 next paragraph]), while double quotes indicate a string for which
790 should be evaluated. For example, backtics are evaluated inside of double
791 quotes, but <bf/not/ for single quotes.
793 \ quotes the next character, just as in shells such as bash and zsh.
794 For example, if want to put quotes ``&dquot;'' inside of a string, you can use
795 ``\'' to force the next character to be a literal instead of interpreted
798 set realname="Michael \"MuttDude\" Elkins"
801 ``\\'' means to insert a literal ``\'' into the line.
802 ``\n'' and ``\r'' have their usual C meanings of linefeed and
803 carriage-return, respectively.
805 A \ at the end of a line can be used to split commands over
806 multiple lines, provided that the split points don't appear in the
807 middle of command names.
809 It is also possible to substitute the output of a Unix command in an
810 initialization file. This is accomplished by enclosing the command in
811 backquotes (``). For example,
813 my_hdr X-Operating-System: `uname -a`
815 The output of the Unix command ``uname -a'' will be substituted before the
816 line is parsed. Note that since initialization files are line oriented, only
817 the first line of output from the Unix command will be substituted.
819 UNIX environments can be accessed like the way it is done in shells like
820 sh and bash: Prepend the name of the environment by a ``$''. For
823 set record=+sent_on_$HOSTNAME
826 The commands understood by mutt are explained in the next paragraphs.
827 For a complete list, see the <ref id="commands" name="command reference">.
829 <sect1>Defining/Using aliases<label id="alias">
832 Usage: <tt/alias/ <em/key/ <em/address/ [ , <em/address/, ... ]
834 It's usually very cumbersome to remember or type out the address of someone
835 you are communicating with. Mutt allows you to create ``aliases'' which map
836 a short string to a full address.
838 <bf/Note:/ if you want to create an alias for a group (by specifying more than
839 one address), you <bf/must/ separate the addresses with a comma (``,'').
841 To remove an alias or aliases (``*'' means all aliases):
843 <tt/unalias/ [ * | <em/key/ <em/.../ ]
846 alias muttdude me@cs.hmc.edu (Michael Elkins)
847 alias theguys manny, moe, jack
850 Unlike other mailers, Mutt doesn't require aliases to be defined
851 in a special file. The <tt/alias/ command can appear anywhere in
852 a configuration file, as long as this file is <ref id="source"
853 name="sourced">. Consequently, you can have multiple alias files, or
854 you can have all aliases defined in your muttrc.
856 On the other hand, the <ref id="create-alias" name="create-alias">
857 function can use only one file, the one pointed to by the <ref
858 id="alias_file" name="$alias_file"> variable (which is
859 <tt>˜/.muttrc</tt> by default). This file is not special either,
860 in the sense that Mutt will happily append aliases to any file, but in
861 order for the new aliases to take effect you need to explicitly <ref
862 id="source" name="source"> this file too.
867 source /usr/local/share/Mutt.aliases
868 source ~/.mail_aliases
869 set alias_file=~/.mail_aliases
872 To use aliases, you merely use the alias at any place in mutt where mutt
873 prompts for addresses, such as the <em/To:/ or <em/Cc:/ prompt. You can
874 also enter aliases in your editor at the appropriate headers if you have the
875 <ref id="edit_headers" name="$edit_headers"> variable set.
877 In addition, at the various address prompts, you can use the tab character
878 to expand a partial alias to the full alias. If there are multiple matches,
879 mutt will bring up a menu with the matching aliases. In order to be
880 presented with the full list of aliases, you must hit tab with out a partial
881 alias, such as at the beginning of the prompt or after a comma denoting
884 In the alias menu, you can select as many aliases as you want with the
885 <em/select-entry/ key (default: RET), and use the <em/exit/ key
886 (default: q) to return to the address prompt.
888 <sect1>Changing the default key bindings<label id="bind">
890 Usage: <tt/bind/ <em/map/ <em/key/ <em/function/
892 This command allows you to change the default key bindings (operation
893 invoked when pressing a key).
895 <em/map/ specifies in which menu the binding belongs. Multiple maps may
896 be specified by separating them with commas (no additional whitespace is
897 allowed). The currently defined maps are:
902 This is not a real menu, but is used as a fallback for all of the other
903 menus except for the pager and editor modes. If a key is not defined in
904 another menu, Mutt will look for a binding to use in this menu. This allows
905 you to bind a key to a certain function in multiple menus instead of having
906 multiple bind statements to accomplish the same task.
908 The alias menu is the list of your personal aliases as defined in your
909 muttrc. It is the mapping from a short alias name to the full email
910 address(es) of the recipient(s).
912 The attachment menu is used to access the attachments on received messages.
914 The browser is used for both browsing the local directory structure, and for
915 listing all of your incoming mailboxes.
917 The editor is the line-based editor the user enters text data.
919 The index is the list of messages contained in a mailbox.
921 The compose menu is the screen used when sending a new message.
923 The pager is the mode used to display message/attachment data, and help
926 The pgp menu is used to select the OpenPGP keys used for encrypting outgoing
929 The postpone menu is similar to the index menu, except is used when
930 recalling a message the user was composing, but saved until later.
933 <em/key/ is the key (or key sequence) you wish to bind. To specify a
934 control character, use the sequence <em/\Cx/, where <em/x/ is the
935 letter of the control character (for example, to specify control-A use
936 ``\Ca''). Note that the case of <em/x/ as well as <em/\C/ is
937 ignored, so that <em/\CA/, <em/\Ca/, <em/\cA/ and <em/\ca/ are all
938 equivalent. An alternative form is to specify the key as a three digit
939 octal number prefixed with a ``\'' (for example <em/\177/ is
940 equivalent to <em/\c?/).
942 In addition, <em/key/ may consist of:
957 <backspace> Backspace
966 <f10> function key 10
969 <em/key/ does not need to be enclosed in quotes unless it contains a
972 <em/function/ specifies which action to take when <em/key/ is pressed.
973 For a complete list of functions, see the <ref id="functions"
974 name="reference">. The special function <tt/noop/ unbinds the specified key
977 <sect1>Defining aliases for character sets <label id="charset-hook">
979 Usage: <tt/charset-hook/ <em/alias/ <em/charset/<newline>
980 Usage: <tt/iconv-hook/ <em/charset/ <em/local-charset/
982 The <tt/charset-hook/ command defines an alias for a character set.
983 This is useful to properly display messages which are tagged with a
984 character set name not known to mutt.
986 The <tt/iconv-hook/ command defines a system-specific name for a
987 character set. This is helpful when your systems character
988 conversion library insists on using strange, system-specific names
992 <sect1>Setting variables based upon mailbox<label id="folder-hook">
994 Usage: <tt/folder-hook/ [!]<em/regexp/ <em/command/
996 It is often desirable to change settings based on which mailbox you are
997 reading. The folder-hook command provides a method by which you can execute
998 any configuration command. <em/regexp/ is a regular expression specifying
999 in which mailboxes to execute <em/command/ before loading. If a mailbox
1000 matches multiple folder-hook's, they are executed in the order given in the
1003 <bf/Note:/ if you use the ``!'' shortcut for <ref id="spoolfile"
1004 name="$spoolfile"> at the beginning of the pattern, you must place it
1005 inside of double or single quotes in order to distinguish it from the
1006 logical <em/not/ operator for the expression.
1008 Note that the settings are <em/not/ restored when you leave the mailbox.
1009 For example, a command action to perform is to change the sorting method
1010 based upon the mailbox being read:
1013 folder-hook mutt set sort=threads
1016 However, the sorting method is not restored to its previous value when
1017 reading a different mailbox. To specify a <em/default/ command, use the
1022 folder-hook . set sort=date-sent
1025 <sect1>Keyboard macros<label id="macro">
1027 Usage: <tt/macro/ <em/menu/ <em/key/ <em/sequence/ [ <em/description/ ]
1029 Macros are useful when you would like a single key to perform a series of
1030 actions. When you press <em/key/ in menu <em/menu/, Mutt will behave as if
1031 you had typed <em/sequence/. So if you have a common sequence of commands
1032 you type, you can create a macro to execute those commands with a single
1035 <em/menu/ is the <ref id="maps" name="map"> which the macro will be bound.
1036 Multiple maps may be specified by separating multiple menu arguments by
1037 commas. Whitespace may not be used in between the menu arguments and the
1038 commas separating them.
1040 <em/key/ and <em/sequence/ are expanded by the same rules as the <ref
1041 id="bind" name="key bindings">. There are some additions however. The
1042 first is that control characters in <em/sequence/ can also be specified
1043 as <em/ˆx/. In order to get a caret (`ˆ'') you need to use
1044 <em/ˆˆ/. Secondly, to specify a certain key such as <em/up/
1045 or to invoke a function directly, you can use the format
1046 <em/<key name>/ and <em/<function name>/. For a listing of key
1047 names see the section on <ref id="bind" name="key bindings">. Functions
1048 are listed in the <ref id="functions" name="function reference">.
1050 The advantage with using function names directly is that the macros will
1051 work regardless of the current key bindings, so they are not dependent on
1052 the user having particular key definitions. This makes them more robust
1053 and portable, and also facilitates defining of macros in files used by more
1054 than one user (eg. the system Muttrc).
1056 Optionally you can specify a descriptive text after <em/sequence/,
1057 which is shown in the help screens.
1059 <bf/Note:/ Macro definitions (if any) listed in the help screen(s), are
1060 silently truncated at the screen width, and are not wrapped.
1062 <sect1>Using color and mono video attributes<label id="color">
1064 Usage: <tt/color/ <em/object/ <em/foreground/ <em/background/ [ <em/regexp/ ]<newline>
1065 Usage: <tt/color/ index <em/foreground/ <em/background/ <em/pattern/<newline>
1066 Usage: <tt/uncolor/ index <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]<newline>
1068 If your terminal supports color, you can spice up Mutt by creating your own
1069 color scheme. To define the color of an object (type of information), you
1070 must specify both a foreground color <bf/and/ a background color (it is not
1071 possible to only specify one or the other).
1073 <em/object/ can be one of:
1077 <item>body (match <em/regexp/ in the body of messages)
1078 <item>bold (hiliting bold patterns in the body of messages)
1079 <item>error (error messages printed by Mutt)
1080 <item>header (match <em/regexp/ in the message header)
1081 <item>hdrdefault (default color of the message header in the pager)
1082 <item>index (match <em/pattern/ in the message index)
1083 <item>indicator (arrow or bar used to indicate the current item in a menu)
1084 <item>markers (the ``+'' markers at the beginning of wrapped lines in the pager)
1085 <item>message (informational messages)
1087 <item>quoted (text matching <ref id="quote_regexp"
1088 name="$quote_regexp"> in the body of a message)
1089 <item>quoted1, quoted2, ..., quoted<bf/N/ (higher levels of quoting)
1090 <item>search (hiliting of words in the pager)
1092 <item>status (mode lines used to display info about the mailbox or message)
1093 <item>tilde (the ``˜'' used to pad blank lines in the pager)
1094 <item>tree (thread tree drawn in the message index and attachment menu)
1095 <item>underline (hiliting underlined patterns in the body of messages)
1098 <em/foreground/ and <em/background/ can be one of the following:
1113 <em/foreground/ can optionally be prefixed with the keyword <tt/bright/ to make
1114 the foreground color boldfaced (e.g., <tt/brightred/).
1116 If your terminal supports it, the special keyword <em/default/ can be
1117 used as a transparent color. The value <em/brightdefault/ is also valid.
1118 If Mutt is linked against the <em/S-Lang/ library, you also need to set
1119 the <em/COLORFGBG/ environment variable to the default colors of your
1120 terminal for this to work; for example (for Bourne-like shells):
1123 set COLORFGBG="green;black"
1127 <bf/Note:/ The <em/S-Lang/ library requires you to use the <em/lightgray/
1128 and <em/brown/ keywords instead of <em/white/ and <em/yellow/ when
1129 setting this variable.
1131 <bf/Note:/ The uncolor command can be applied to the index object only. It
1132 removes entries from the list. You <bf/must/ specify the same pattern
1133 specified in the color command for it to be removed. The pattern ``*'' is
1134 a special token which means to clear the color index list of all entries.
1136 Mutt also recognizes the keywords <em/color0/, <em/color1/, …,
1137 <em/color/<bf/N-1/ (<bf/N/ being the number of colors supported
1138 by your terminal). This is useful when you remap the colors for your
1139 display (for example by changing the color associated with <em/color2/
1140 for your xterm), since color names may then lose their normal meaning.
1142 If your terminal does not support color, it is still possible change the video
1143 attributes through the use of the ``mono'' command:
1145 Usage: <tt/mono/ <em/<object> <attribute>/ [ <em/regexp/ ]<newline>
1146 Usage: <tt/mono/ index <em/attribute/ <em/pattern/<newline>
1147 Usage: <tt/unmono/ index <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]<newline>
1149 where <em/attribute/ is one of the following:
1159 <sect1>Ignoring (weeding) unwanted message headers<label id="ignore">
1161 Usage: <tt/[un]ignore/ <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]
1163 Messages often have many header fields added by automatic processing systems,
1164 or which may not seem useful to display on the screen. This command allows
1165 you to specify header fields which you don't normally want to see.
1167 You do not need to specify the full header field name. For example,
1168 ``ignore content-'' will ignore all header fields that begin with the pattern
1169 ``content-''. ``ignore *'' will ignore all headers.
1171 To remove a previously added token from the list, use the ``unignore'' command.
1172 The ``unignore'' command will make Mutt display headers with the given pattern.
1173 For example, if you do ``ignore x-'' it is possible to ``unignore x-mailer''.
1175 ``unignore *'' will remove all tokens from the ignore list.
1179 # Sven's draconian header weeding
1181 unignore from date subject to cc
1182 unignore organization organisation x-mailer: x-newsreader: x-mailing-list:
1186 <sect1>Alternative addresses<label id="alternates">
1188 Usage: <tt/[un]alternates/ <em/regexp/ [ <em/regexp/ ... ]<newline>
1190 With various functions, mutt will treat messages differently,
1191 depending on whether you sent them or whether you received them from
1192 someone else. For instance, when replying to a message that you
1193 sent to a different party, mutt will automatically suggest to send
1194 the response to the original message's recipients -- responding to
1195 yourself won't make much sense in many cases. (See <ref
1196 id="reply_to" name="$reply_to">.)
1198 Many users receive e-mail under a number of different addresses. To
1199 fully use mutt's features here, the program must be able to
1200 recognize what e-mail addresses you receive mail under. That's the
1201 purpose of the <tt/alternates/ command: It takes a list of regular
1202 expressions, each of which can identify an address under which you
1205 The <tt/unalternates/ command can be used to write exceptions to
1206 <tt/alternates/ patterns. If an address matches something in an
1207 <tt/alternates/ command, but you nonetheless do not think it is
1208 from you, you can list a more precise pattern under an <tt/unalternates/
1211 To remove a regular expression from the <tt/alternates/ list, use the
1212 <tt/unalternates/ command with exactly the same <em/regexp/.
1213 Likewise, if the <em/regexp/ for a <tt/alternates/ command matches
1214 an entry on the <tt/unalternates/ list, that <tt/unalternates/
1215 entry will be removed. If the <em/regexp/ for <tt/unalternates/
1216 is ``*'', <em/all entries/ on <tt/alternates/ will be removed.
1218 <sect1>Mailing lists<label id="lists">
1220 Usage: <tt/[un]lists/ <em/regexp/ [ <em/regexp/ ... ]<newline>
1221 Usage: <tt/[un]subscribe/ <em/regexp/ [ <em/regexp/ ... ]
1223 Mutt has a few nice features for <ref id="using_lists" name="handling
1224 mailing lists">. In order to take advantage of them, you must
1225 specify which addresses belong to mailing lists, and which mailing
1226 lists you are subscribed to. Once you have done this, the <ref
1227 id="list-reply" name="list-reply"> function will work for all known lists.
1228 Additionally, when you send a message to a subscribed list, mutt will
1229 add a Mail-Followup-To header to tell other users' mail user agents
1230 not to send copies of replies to your personal address. Note that
1231 the Mail-Followup-To header is a non-standard extension which is not
1232 supported by all mail user agents. Adding it is not bullet-proof against
1233 receiving personal CCs of list messages. Also note that the generation
1234 of the Mail-Followup-To header is controlled by the <ref id="followup_to"
1235 name="$followup_to"> configuration variable.
1237 More precisely, Mutt maintains lists of patterns for the addresses
1238 of known and subscribed mailing lists. Every subscribed mailing
1239 list is known. To mark a mailing list as known, use the ``lists''
1240 command. To mark it as subscribed, use ``subscribe''.
1242 You can use regular expressions with both commands. To mark all
1243 messages sent to a specific bug report's address on mutt's bug
1244 tracking system as list mail, for instance, you could say
1245 ``subscribe [0-9]*@bugs.guug.de''. Often, it's sufficient to just
1246 give a portion of the list's e-mail address.
1248 Specify as much of the address as you need to to remove ambiguity. For
1249 example, if you've subscribed to the Mutt mailing list, you will receive mail
1250 addresssed to <em/mutt-users@mutt.org/. So, to tell Mutt that this is a
1251 mailing list, you could add ``lists mutt-users'' to your
1252 initialization file. To tell mutt that you are subscribed to it,
1253 add ``subscribe mutt-users'' to your initialization file instead.
1254 If you also happen to get mail from someone whose address is
1255 <em/mutt-users@example.com/, you could use ``lists mutt-users@mutt\\.org''
1256 or ``subscribe mutt-users@mutt\\.org'' to
1257 match only mail from the actual list.
1259 The ``unlists'' command is used to remove a token from the list of
1260 known and subscribed mailing-lists. Use ``unlists *'' to remove all
1263 To remove a mailing list from the list of subscribed mailing lists,
1264 but keep it on the list of known mailing lists, use ``unsubscribe''.
1266 <sect1>Using Multiple spool mailboxes<label id="mbox-hook">
1268 Usage: <tt/mbox-hook/ [!]<em/pattern/ <em/mailbox/
1270 This command is used to move read messages from a specified mailbox to a
1271 different mailbox automatically when you quit or change folders.
1272 <em/pattern/ is a regular expression specifying the mailbox to treat as a
1273 ``spool'' mailbox and <em/mailbox/ specifies where mail should be saved when
1276 Unlike some of the other <em/hook/ commands, only the <em/first/ matching
1277 pattern is used (it is not possible to save read mail in more than a single
1280 <sect1>Defining mailboxes which receive mail<label id="mailboxes">
1282 Usage: <tt/[un]mailboxes/ [!]<em/filename/ [ <em/filename/ ... ]
1284 This command specifies folders which can receive mail and
1285 which will be checked for new messages. By default, the
1286 main menu status bar displays how many of these folders have
1289 When changing folders, pressing <em/space/ will cycle
1290 through folders with new mail.
1292 Pressing TAB in the directory browser will bring up a menu showing the files
1293 specified by the <tt/mailboxes/ command, and indicate which contain new
1294 messages. Mutt will automatically enter this mode when invoked from the
1295 command line with the <tt/-y/ option.
1297 The ``unmailboxes'' command is used to remove a token from the list
1298 of folders which receive mail. Use ``unmailboxes *'' to remove all
1302 <bf/Note:/ new mail is detected by comparing the last modification time to
1303 the last access time. Utilities like <tt/biff/ or <tt/frm/ or any other
1304 program which accesses the mailbox might cause Mutt to never detect new mail
1305 for that mailbox if they do not properly reset the access time. Backup
1306 tools are another common reason for updated access times.
1309 <bf/Note:/ the filenames in the <tt/mailboxes/ command are resolved when
1310 the command is executed, so if these names contain <ref id="shortcuts"
1311 name="shortcut characters"> (such as ``='' and ``!''), any variable
1312 definition that affect these characters (like <ref id="folder"
1313 name="$folder"> and <ref id="spoolfile" name="$spoolfile">)
1314 should be executed before the <tt/mailboxes/ command.
1316 <sect1>User defined headers<label id="my_hdr">
1319 <tt/my_hdr/ <em/string/<newline>
1320 <tt/unmy_hdr/ <em/field/ [ <em/field/ ... ]
1322 The ``my_hdr'' command allows you to create your own header
1323 fields which will be added to every message you send.
1325 For example, if you would like to add an ``Organization:'' header field to
1326 all of your outgoing messages, you can put the command
1329 my_hdr Organization: A Really Big Company, Anytown, USA
1332 in your <tt/.muttrc/.
1334 <bf/Note:/ space characters are <em/not/ allowed between the keyword and
1335 the colon (``:''). The standard for electronic mail (RFC822) says that
1336 space is illegal there, so Mutt enforces the rule.
1338 If you would like to add a header field to a single message, you should
1339 either set the <ref id="edit_headers" name="edit_headers"> variable,
1340 or use the <em/edit-headers/ function (default: ``E'') in the send-menu so
1341 that you can edit the header of your message along with the body.
1343 To remove user defined header fields, use the ``unmy_hdr''
1344 command. You may specify an asterisk (``*'') to remove all header
1345 fields, or the fields to remove. For example, to remove all ``To'' and
1346 ``Cc'' header fields, you could use:
1352 <sect1>Defining the order of headers when viewing messages<label id="hdr_order">
1354 Usage: <tt/hdr_order/ <em/header1/ <em/header2/ <em/header3/
1356 With this command, you can specify an order in which mutt will attempt
1357 to present headers to you when viewing messages.
1359 ``unhdr_order *'' will clear all previous headers from the order list,
1360 thus removing the header order effects set by the system-wide startup
1364 hdr_order From Date: From: To: Cc: Subject:
1367 <sect1>Specify default save filename<label id="save-hook">
1369 Usage: <tt/save-hook/ [!]<em/pattern/ <em/filename/
1371 This command is used to override the default filename used when saving
1372 messages. <em/filename/ will be used as the default filename if the message is
1373 <em/From:/ an address matching <em/regexp/ or if you are the author and the
1374 message is addressed <em/to:/ something matching <em/regexp/.
1376 See <ref id="pattern_hook" name="Message Matching in Hooks"> for information on the exact format of <em/pattern/.
1381 save-hook me@(turing\\.)?cs\\.hmc\\.edu$ +elkins
1382 save-hook aol\\.com$ +spam
1385 Also see the <ref id="fcc-save-hook" name="fcc-save-hook"> command.
1387 <sect1>Specify default Fcc: mailbox when composing<label id="fcc-hook">
1389 Usage: <tt/fcc-hook/ [!]<em/pattern/ <em/mailbox/
1391 This command is used to save outgoing mail in a mailbox other than
1392 <ref id="record" name="$record">. Mutt searches the initial list of
1393 message recipients for the first matching <em/regexp/ and uses <em/mailbox/
1394 as the default Fcc: mailbox. If no match is found the message will be saved
1395 to <ref id="record" name="$record"> mailbox.
1397 See <ref id="pattern_hook" name="Message Matching in Hooks"> for information on the exact format of <em/pattern/.
1399 Example: <tt/fcc-hook [@.]aol\\.com$ +spammers/
1401 The above will save a copy of all messages going to the aol.com domain to
1402 the `+spammers' mailbox by default. Also see the <ref id="fcc-save-hook"
1403 name="fcc-save-hook"> command.
1405 <sect1>Specify default save filename and default Fcc: mailbox at once<label
1408 Usage: <tt/fcc-save-hook/ [!]<em/pattern/ <em/mailbox/
1410 This command is a shortcut, equivalent to doing both a <ref id="fcc-hook" name="fcc-hook">
1411 and a <ref id="save-hook" name="save-hook"> with its arguments.
1413 <sect1>Change settings based upon message recipients<label id="send-hook"><label id="reply-hook"><label id="send2-hook">
1415 Usage: <tt/reply-hook/ [!]<em/pattern/ <em/command/<newline>
1416 Usage: <tt/send-hook/ [!]<em/pattern/ <em/command/<newline>
1417 Usage: <tt/send2-hook/ [!]<em/pattern/ <em/command/
1419 These commands can be used to execute arbitrary configuration commands based
1420 upon recipients of the message. <em/pattern/ is a regular expression
1421 matching the desired address. <em/command/ is executed when <em/regexp/
1422 matches recipients of the message.
1424 <tt/reply-hook/ is matched against the message you are <em/replying/
1425 <bf/to/, instead of the message you are <em/sending/. <tt/send-hook/ is
1426 matched against all messages, both <em/new/ and <em/replies/. <bf/Note:/
1427 <tt/reply-hook/s are matched <bf/before/ the <tt/send-hook/, <bf/regardless/
1428 of the order specified in the users's configuration file.
1430 <tt/send2-hook/ is matched every time a message is changed, either
1431 by editing it, or by using the compose menu to change its recipients
1432 or subject. <tt/send2-hook/ is executed after <tt/send-hook/, and
1433 can, e.g., be used to set parameters such as the <ref id="sendmail"
1434 name="$sendmail"> variable depending on the message's sender
1437 For each type of <tt/send-hook/ or <tt/reply-hook/, when multiple matches
1438 occur, commands are executed in the order they are specified in the muttrc
1439 (for that type of hook).
1441 See <ref id="pattern_hook" name="Message Matching in Hooks"> for information on the exact format of <em/pattern/.
1443 Example: <tt/send-hook mutt &dquot;set mime_forward signature=''&dquot;/
1445 Another typical use for this command is to change the values of the
1446 <ref id="attribution" name="$attribution">, <ref id="signature"
1447 name="$signature"> and <ref id="locale" name="$locale">
1448 variables in order to change the language of the attributions and
1449 signatures based upon the recipients.
1451 <bf/Note:/ the send-hook's are only executed ONCE after getting the initial
1452 list of recipients. Adding a recipient after replying or editing the
1453 message will NOT cause any send-hook to be executed. Also note that
1454 my_hdr commands which modify recipient headers, or the message's
1455 subject, don't have any effect on the current message when executed
1458 <sect1>Change settings before formatting a message<label id="message-hook">
1460 Usage: <tt/message-hook/ [!]<em/pattern/ <em/command/
1462 This command can be used to execute arbitrary configuration commands
1463 before viewing or formatting a message based upon information about the message.
1464 <em/command/ is executed if the <em/pattern/ matches the message to be
1465 displayed. When multiple matches occur, commands are executed in the order
1466 they are specified in the muttrc.
1468 See <ref id="pattern_hook" name="Message Matching in Hooks"> for
1469 information on the exact format of <em/pattern/.
1473 message-hook ~A 'set pager=builtin'
1474 message-hook '~f freshmeat-news' 'set pager="less \"+/^ subject: .*\""'
1477 <sect1>Choosing the cryptographic key of the recipient<label id="crypt-hook">
1479 Usage: <tt/crypt-hook/ <em/pattern/ <em/keyid/
1481 When encrypting messages with PGP or OpenSSL, you may want to associate a certain
1482 key with a given e-mail address automatically, either because the
1483 recipient's public key can't be deduced from the destination address,
1484 or because, for some reasons, you need to override the key Mutt would
1485 normally use. The crypt-hook command provides a method by which you can
1486 specify the ID of the public key to be used when encrypting messages to
1487 a certain recipient.
1489 The meaning of "key id" is to be taken broadly in this context: You
1490 can either put a numerical key ID here, an e-mail address, or even
1493 <sect1>Adding key sequences to the keyboard buffer<label id="push">
1495 Usage: <tt/push/ <em/string/
1497 This command adds the named string to the keyboard buffer. The string may
1498 contain control characters, key names and function names like the sequence
1499 string in the <ref id="macro" name="macro"> command. You may use it to
1500 automatically run a sequence of commands at startup, or when entering
1503 <sect1>Executing functions<label id="exec">
1505 Usage: <tt/exec/ <em/function/ [ <em/function/ ... ]
1507 This command can be used to execute any function. Functions are
1508 listed in the <ref id="functions" name="function reference">.
1509 ``exec function'' is equivalent to ``push <function>''.
1511 <sect1>Message Scoring<label id="score-command">
1513 Usage: <tt/score/ <em/pattern/ <em/value/<newline>
1514 Usage: <tt/unscore/ <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]
1516 The <tt/score/ commands adds <em/value/ to a message's score if <em/pattern/
1517 matches it. <em/pattern/ is a string in the format described in the <ref
1518 id="patterns" name="patterns"> section (note: For efficiency reasons, patterns
1519 which scan information not available in the index, such as <tt>˜b</tt>,
1520 <tt>˜B</tt> or <tt>˜h</tt>, may not be used). <em/value/ is a
1521 positive or negative integer. A message's final score is the sum total of all
1522 matching <tt/score/ entries. However, you may optionally prefix <em/value/ with
1523 an equal sign (=) to cause evaluation to stop at a particular entry if there is
1524 a match. Negative final scores are rounded up to 0.
1526 The <tt/unscore/ command removes score entries from the list. You <bf/must/
1527 specify the same pattern specified in the <tt/score/ command for it to be
1528 removed. The pattern ``*'' is a special token which means to clear the list
1529 of all score entries.
1531 <sect1>Spam detection<label id="spam">
1533 Usage: <tt/spam/ <em/pattern/ <em/format/<newline>
1534 Usage: <tt/nospam/ <em/pattern/
1536 Mutt has generalized support for external spam-scoring filters.
1537 By defining your spam patterns with the <tt/spam/ and <tt/nospam/
1538 commands, you can <em/limit/, <em/search/, and <em/sort/ your
1539 mail based on its spam attributes, as determined by the external
1540 filter. You also can display the spam attributes in your index
1541 display using the <tt/%H/ selector in the <ref id="index_format"
1542 name="$index_format"> variable. (Tip: try <tt/%?H?[%H] ?/
1543 to display spam tags only when they are defined for a given message.)
1545 Your first step is to define your external filter's spam patterns using
1546 the <tt/spam/ command. <em/pattern/ should be a regular expression
1547 that matches a header in a mail message. If any message in the mailbox
1548 matches this regular expression, it will receive a ``spam tag'' or
1549 ``spam attribute'' (unless it also matches a <tt/nospam/ pattern -- see
1550 below.) The appearance of this attribute is entirely up to you, and is
1551 governed by the <em/format/ parameter. <em/format/ can be any static
1552 text, but it also can include back-references from the <em/pattern/
1553 expression. (A regular expression ``back-reference'' refers to a
1554 sub-expression contained within parentheses.) <tt/%1/ is replaced with
1555 the first back-reference in the regex, <tt/%2/ with the second, etc.
1557 If you're using multiple spam filters, a message can have more than
1558 one spam-related header. You can define <tt/spam/ patterns for each
1559 filter you use. If a message matches two or more of these patterns, and
1560 the $spam_separator variable is set to a string, then the
1561 message's spam tag will consist of all the <em/format/ strings joined
1562 together, with the value of $spam_separator separating
1565 For example, suppose I use DCC, SpamAssassin, and PureMessage. I might
1566 define these spam settings:
1568 spam "X-DCC-.*-Metrics:.*(....)=many" "90+/DCC-%1"
1569 spam "X-Spam-Status: Yes" "90+/SA"
1570 spam "X-PerlMX-Spam: .*Probability=([0-9]+)%" "%1/PM"
1571 set spam_separator=", "
1574 If I then received a message that DCC registered with ``many'' hits
1575 under the ``Fuz2'' checksum, and that PureMessage registered with a
1576 97% probability of being spam, that message's spam tag would read
1577 <tt>90+/DCC-Fuz2, 97/PM</tt>. (The four characters before ``=many'' in a
1578 DCC report indicate the checksum used -- in this case, ``Fuz2''.)
1580 If the $spam_separator variable is unset, then each
1581 spam pattern match supercedes the previous one. Instead of getting
1582 joined <em/format/ strings, you'll get only the last one to match.
1584 The spam tag is what will be displayed in the index when you use
1585 <tt/%H/ in the <tt/$index_format/ variable. It's also the
1586 string that the <tt/~H/ pattern-matching expression matches against for
1587 <em/search/ and <em/limit/ functions. And it's what sorting by spam
1588 attribute will use as a sort key.
1590 That's a pretty complicated example, and most people's actual
1591 environments will have only one spam filter. The simpler your
1592 configuration, the more effective mutt can be, especially when it comes
1595 Generally, when you sort by spam tag, mutt will sort <em/lexically/ --
1596 that is, by ordering strings alphnumerically. However, if a spam tag
1597 begins with a number, mutt will sort numerically first, and lexically
1598 only when two numbers are equal in value. (This is like UNIX's
1599 <tt/sort -n/.) A message with no spam attributes at all -- that is, one
1600 that didn't match <em/any/ of your <tt/spam/ patterns -- is sorted at
1601 lowest priority. Numbers are sorted next, beginning with 0 and ranging
1602 upward. Finally, non-numeric strings are sorted, with ``a'' taking lower
1603 priority than ``z''. Clearly, in general, sorting by spam tags is most
1604 effective when you can coerce your filter to give you a raw number. But
1605 in case you can't, mutt can still do something useful.
1607 The <tt/nospam/ command can be used to write exceptions to <tt/spam/
1608 patterns. If a header pattern matches something in a <tt/spam/ command,
1609 but you nonetheless do not want it to receive a spam tag, you can list a
1610 more precise pattern under a <tt/nospam/ command.
1612 If the <em/pattern/ given to <tt/nospam/ is exactly the same as the
1613 <em/pattern/ on an existing <tt/spam/ list entry, the effect will be to
1614 remove the entry from the spam list, instead of adding an exception.
1615 Likewise, if the <em/pattern/ for a <tt/spam/ command matches an entry
1616 on the <tt/nospam/ list, that <tt/nospam/ entry will be removed. If the
1617 <em/pattern/ for <tt/nospam/ is ``*'', <em/all entries on both lists/
1618 will be removed. This might be the default action if you use <tt/spam/
1619 and <tt/nospam/ in conjunction with a <tt/folder-hook/.
1621 You can have as many <tt/spam/ or <tt/nospam/ commands as you like.
1622 You can even do your own primitive spam detection within mutt -- for
1623 example, if you consider all mail from <tt/MAILER-DAEMON/ to be spam,
1624 you can use a <tt/spam/ command like this:
1627 spam "^From: .*MAILER-DAEMON" "999"
1631 <sect1>Setting variables<label id="set">
1633 Usage: <tt/set/ [no|inv]<em/variable/[=<em/value/] [ <em/variable/ ... ]<newline>
1634 Usage: <tt/toggle/ <em/variable/ [<em/variable/ ... ]<newline>
1635 Usage: <tt/unset/ <em/variable/ [<em/variable/ ... ]<newline>
1636 Usage: <tt/reset/ <em/variable/ [<em/variable/ ... ]
1638 This command is used to set (and unset) <ref id="variables"
1639 name="configuration variables">. There are four basic types of variables:
1640 boolean, number, string and quadoption. <em/boolean/ variables can be
1641 <em/set/ (true) or <em/unset/ (false). <em/number/ variables can be
1642 assigned a positive integer value.
1644 <em/string/ variables consist of any number of printable characters.
1645 <em/strings/ must be enclosed in quotes if they contain spaces or tabs. You
1646 may also use the ``C'' escape sequences <bf/\n/ and <bf/\t/ for
1647 newline and tab, respectively.
1649 <em/quadoption/ variables are used to control whether or not to be prompted
1650 for certain actions, or to specify a default action. A value of <em/yes/
1651 will cause the action to be carried out automatically as if you had answered
1652 yes to the question. Similarly, a value of <em/no/ will cause the the
1653 action to be carried out as if you had answered ``no.'' A value of
1654 <em/ask-yes/ will cause a prompt with a default answer of ``yes'' and
1655 <em/ask-no/ will provide a default answer of ``no.''
1657 Prefixing a variable with ``no'' will unset it. Example: <tt/set noaskbcc/.
1659 For <em/boolean/ variables, you may optionally prefix the variable name with
1660 <tt/inv/ to toggle the value (on or off). This is useful when writing
1661 macros. Example: <tt/set invsmart_wrap/.
1663 The <tt/toggle/ command automatically prepends the <tt/inv/ prefix to all
1664 specified variables.
1666 The <tt/unset/ command automatically prepends the <tt/no/ prefix to all
1667 specified variables.
1669 Using the enter-command function in the <em/index/ menu, you can query the
1670 value of a variable by prefixing the name of the variable with a question
1677 The question mark is actually only required for boolean and quadoption
1680 The <tt/reset/ command resets all given variables to the compile time
1681 defaults (hopefully mentioned in this manual). If you use the command
1682 <tt/set/ and prefix the variable with ``&'' this has the same
1683 behavior as the reset command.
1685 With the <tt/reset/ command there exists the special variable ``all'',
1686 which allows you to reset all variables to their system defaults.
1688 <sect1>Reading initialization commands from another file<label id="source">
1690 Usage: <tt/source/ <em/filename/ [ <em/filename/ ... ]
1692 This command allows the inclusion of initialization commands
1693 from other files. For example, I place all of my aliases in
1694 <tt>˜/.mail_aliases</tt> so that I can make my
1695 <tt>˜/.muttrc</tt> readable and keep my aliases private.
1697 If the filename begins with a tilde (``˜''), it will be expanded to the
1698 path of your home directory.
1700 If the filename ends with a vertical bar (|), then <em/filename/ is
1701 considered to be an executable program from which to read input (eg.
1702 <tt>source ~/bin/myscript|</tt>).
1704 <sect1>Removing hooks<label id="unhook">
1706 Usage: <tt/unhook/ [ * | <em/hook-type/ ]
1708 This command permits you to flush hooks you have previously defined.
1709 You can either remove all hooks by giving the ``*'' character as an
1710 argument, or you can remove all hooks of a specific type by saying
1711 something like <tt/unhook send-hook/.
1713 <sect>Advanced Usage
1715 <sect1>Regular Expressions<label id="regexp">
1717 All string patterns in Mutt including those in more complex
1718 <ref id="patterns" name="patterns"> must be specified
1719 using regular expressions (regexp) in the ``POSIX extended'' syntax (which
1720 is more or less the syntax used by egrep and GNU awk). For your
1721 convenience, we have included below a brief description of this syntax.
1723 The search is case sensitive if the pattern contains at least one upper
1724 case letter, and case insensitive otherwise. Note that ``\''
1725 must be quoted if used for a regular expression in an initialization
1726 command: ``\\''.
1728 A regular expression is a pattern that describes a set of strings.
1729 Regular expressions are constructed analogously to arithmetic
1730 expressions, by using various operators to combine smaller expressions.
1732 Note that the regular expression can be enclosed/delimited by either &dquot;
1733 or ' which is useful if the regular expression includes a white-space
1734 character. See <ref id="muttrc-syntax" name="Syntax of Initialization Files">
1735 for more information on &dquot; and ' delimiter processing. To match a
1736 literal &dquot; or ' you must preface it with \ (backslash).
1738 The fundamental building blocks are the regular expressions that match
1739 a single character. Most characters, including all letters and digits,
1740 are regular expressions that match themselves. Any metacharacter with
1741 special meaning may be quoted by preceding it with a backslash.
1743 The period ``.'' matches any single character. The caret ``ˆ'' and
1744 the dollar sign ``&dollar'' are metacharacters that respectively match
1745 the empty string at the beginning and end of a line.
1747 A list of characters enclosed by ``['' and ``]'' matches any
1748 single character in that list; if the first character of the list
1749 is a caret ``ˆ'' then it matches any character <bf/not/ in the
1750 list. For example, the regular expression <bf/[0123456789]/
1751 matches any single digit. A range of ASCII characters may be specified
1752 by giving the first and last characters, separated by a hyphen
1753 ``‐''. Most metacharacters lose their special meaning inside
1754 lists. To include a literal ``]'' place it first in the list.
1755 Similarly, to include a literal ``ˆ'' place it anywhere but first.
1756 Finally, to include a literal hyphen ``‐'' place it last.
1758 Certain named classes of characters are predefined. Character classes
1759 consist of ``[:'', a keyword denoting the class, and ``:]''.
1760 The following classes are defined by the POSIX standard:
1763 <tag/[:alnum:]/
1764 Alphanumeric characters.
1765 <tag/[:alpha:]/
1766 Alphabetic characters.
1767 <tag/[:blank:]/
1768 Space or tab characters.
1769 <tag/[:cntrl:]/
1771 <tag/[:digit:]/
1773 <tag/[:graph:]/
1774 Characters that are both printable and visible. (A space is printable,
1775 but not visible, while an ``a'' is both.)
1776 <tag/[:lower:]/
1777 Lower-case alphabetic characters.
1778 <tag/[:print:]/
1779 Printable characters (characters that are not control characters.)
1780 <tag/[:punct:]/
1781 Punctuation characters (characters that are not letter, digits, control
1782 characters, or space characters).
1783 <tag/[:space:]/
1784 Space characters (such as space, tab and formfeed, to name a few).
1785 <tag/[:upper:]/
1786 Upper-case alphabetic characters.
1787 <tag/[:xdigit:]/
1788 Characters that are hexadecimal digits.
1791 A character class is only valid in a regular expression inside the
1792 brackets of a character list. Note that the brackets in these
1793 class names are part of the symbolic names, and must be included
1794 in addition to the brackets delimiting the bracket list. For
1795 example, <bf/[[:digit:]]/ is equivalent to
1796 <bf/[0-9]/.
1798 Two additional special sequences can appear in character lists. These
1799 apply to non-ASCII character sets, which can have single symbols (called
1800 collating elements) that are represented with more than one character,
1801 as well as several characters that are equivalent for collating or
1805 <tag/Collating Symbols/
1806 A collating symbol is a multi-character collating element enclosed in
1807 ``[.'' and ``.]''. For example, if ``ch'' is a collating
1808 element, then <bf/[[.ch.]]/ is a regexp that matches
1809 this collating element, while <bf/[ch]/ is a regexp that
1810 matches either ``c'' or ``h''.
1811 <tag/Equivalence Classes/
1812 An equivalence class is a locale-specific name for a list of
1813 characters that are equivalent. The name is enclosed in ``[=''
1814 and ``=]''. For example, the name ``e'' might be used to
1815 represent all of ``è'' ``é'' and ``e''. In this case,
1816 <bf/[[=e=]]/ is a regexp that matches any of
1817 ``è'', ``é'' and ``e''.
1820 A regular expression matching a single character may be followed by one
1821 of several repetition operators:
1825 The preceding item is optional and matched at most once.
1827 The preceding item will be matched zero or more times.
1829 The preceding item will be matched one or more times.
1831 The preceding item is matched exactly <em/n/ times.
1832 <tag/{n,}/
1833 The preceding item is matched <em/n/ or more times.
1834 <tag/{,m}/
1835 The preceding item is matched at most <em/m/ times.
1836 <tag/{n,m}/
1837 The preceding item is matched at least <em/n/ times, but no more than
1841 Two regular expressions may be concatenated; the resulting regular
1842 expression matches any string formed by concatenating two substrings
1843 that respectively match the concatenated subexpressions.
1845 Two regular expressions may be joined by the infix operator ``|'';
1846 the resulting regular expression matches any string matching either
1849 Repetition takes precedence over concatenation, which in turn takes
1850 precedence over alternation. A whole subexpression may be enclosed in
1851 parentheses to override these precedence rules.
1853 <bf/Note:/ If you compile Mutt with the GNU <em/rx/ package, the
1854 following operators may also be used in regular expressions:
1858 Matches the empty string at either the beginning or the end of a word.
1860 Matches the empty string within a word.
1861 <tag/\\</
1862 Matches the empty string at the beginning of a word.
1863 <tag/\\>/
1864 Matches the empty string at the end of a word.
1866 Matches any word-constituent character (letter, digit, or underscore).
1868 Matches any character that is not word-constituent.
1870 Matches the empty string at the beginning of a buffer (string).
1872 Matches the empty string at the end of a buffer.
1875 Please note however that these operators are not defined by POSIX, so
1876 they may or may not be available in stock libraries on various systems.
1878 <sect1>Patterns<label id="patterns">
1880 Many of Mutt's commands allow you to specify a pattern to match
1881 (limit, tag-pattern, delete-pattern, etc.). There are several ways to select
1886 ~b EXPR messages which contain EXPR in the message body
1887 ~B EXPR messages which contain EXPR in the whole message
1888 ~c USER messages carbon-copied to USER
1889 ~C EXPR message is either to: or cc: EXPR
1891 ~d [MIN]-[MAX] messages with ``date-sent'' in a Date range
1893 ~e EXPR message which contains EXPR in the ``Sender'' field
1895 ~f USER messages originating from USER
1896 ~g cryptographically signed messages
1897 ~G cryptographically encrypted messages
1898 ~H EXPR messages with a spam attribute matching EXPR
1899 ~h EXPR messages which contain EXPR in the message header
1900 ~k message contains PGP key material
1901 ~i ID message which match ID in the ``Message-ID'' field
1902 ~L EXPR message is either originated or received by EXPR
1903 ~l message is addressed to a known mailing list
1904 ~m [MIN]-[MAX] message in the range MIN to MAX *)
1905 ~n [MIN]-[MAX] messages with a score in the range MIN to MAX *)
1908 ~p message is addressed to you (consults alternates)
1909 ~P message is from you (consults alternates)
1910 ~Q messages which have been replied to
1912 ~r [MIN]-[MAX] messages with ``date-received'' in a Date range
1913 ~S superseded messages
1914 ~s SUBJECT messages having SUBJECT in the ``Subject'' field.
1916 ~t USER messages addressed to USER
1918 ~v message is part of a collapsed thread.
1919 ~V cryptographically verified messages
1920 ~x EXPR messages which contain EXPR in the `References' field
1921 ~y EXPR messages which contain EXPR in the `X-Label' field
1922 ~z [MIN]-[MAX] messages with a size in the range MIN to MAX *)
1923 ~= duplicated messages (see $duplicate_threads)
1924 ~$ unreferenced messages (requires threaded view)
1925 ~* ``From'' contains realname and (syntactically) valid
1926 address (excluded are addresses matching against
1927 alternates or any alias)
1930 Where EXPR, USER, ID, and SUBJECT are
1931 <ref id="regexp" name="regular expressions">. Special attention has to be
1932 made when using regular expressions inside of patterns. Specifically,
1933 Mutt's parser for these patterns will strip one level of backslash (\),
1934 which is normally used for quoting. If it is your intention to use a
1935 backslash in the regular expression, you will need to use two backslashes
1938 *) The forms <tt/<[MAX]/, <tt/>[MIN]/,
1939 <tt/[MIN]-/ and <tt/-[MAX]/
1942 <sect2>Pattern Modifier
1945 Note that patterns matching 'lists' of addresses (notably c,C,p,P and t)
1946 match if there is at least one match in the whole list. If you want to
1947 make sure that all elements of that list match, you need to prefix your
1949 This example matches all mails which only has recipients from Germany.
1955 <sect2>Complex Patterns
1958 Logical AND is performed by specifying more than one criterion. For
1965 would select messages which contain the word ``mutt'' in the list of
1966 recipients <bf/and/ that have the word ``elkins'' in the ``From'' header
1969 Mutt also recognizes the following operators to create more complex search
1973 <item>! -- logical NOT operator
1974 <item>| -- logical OR operator
1975 <item>() -- logical grouping operator
1978 Here is an example illustrating a complex search pattern. This pattern will
1979 select all messages which do not contain ``mutt'' in the ``To'' or ``Cc''
1980 field and which are from ``elkins''.
1983 !(~t mutt|~c mutt) ~f elkins
1986 Here is an example using white space in the regular expression (note
1987 the ' and &dquot; delimiters). For this to match, the mail's subject must
1988 match the ``^Junk +From +Me$'' and it must be from either ``Jim +Somebody''
1989 or ``Ed +SomeoneElse'':
1992 '~s "^Junk +From +Me$" ~f ("Jim +Somebody"|"Ed +SomeoneElse")'
1995 Note that if a regular expression contains parenthesis, or a veritical bar
1996 ("|"), you <bf/must/ enclose the expression in double or single quotes since
1997 those characters are also used to separate different parts of Mutt's
1998 pattern language. For example,
2001 ~f "me@(mutt\.org|cs\.hmc\.edu)"
2004 Without the quotes, the parenthesis wouldn't end.
2005 This would be seperated to two OR'd patterns: <em/˜f me@(mutt\.org/
2006 and <em/cs\.hmc\.edu)/. They are never what you want.
2008 <sect2>Searching by Date
2010 Mutt supports two types of dates, <em/absolute/ and <em/relative/.
2012 <bf/Absolute/. Dates <bf/must/ be in DD/MM/YY format (month and year are
2013 optional, defaulting to the current month and year). An example of a valid
2017 Limit to messages matching: ~d 20/1/95-31/10
2020 If you omit the minimum (first) date, and just specify ``-DD/MM/YY'', all
2021 messages <em/before/ the given date will be selected. If you omit the maximum
2022 (second) date, and specify ``DD/MM/YY-'', all messages <em/after/ the given
2023 date will be selected. If you specify a single date with no dash (``-''),
2024 only messages sent on the given date will be selected.
2026 <bf/Error Margins/. You can add error margins to absolute dates.
2027 An error margin is a sign (+ or -), followed by a digit, followed by
2028 one of the following units:
2035 As a special case, you can replace the sign by a ``*'' character,
2036 which is equivalent to giving identical plus and minus error margins.
2038 Example: To select any messages two weeks around January 15, 2001,
2039 you'd use the following pattern:
2041 Limit to messages matching: ~d 15/1/2001*2w
2045 <bf/Relative/. This type of date is relative to the current date, and may
2048 <item>><em/offset/ (messages older than <em/offset/ units)
2049 <item><<em/offset/ (messages newer than <em/offset/ units)
2050 <item>=<em/offset/ (messages exactly <em/offset/ units old)
2053 <em/offset/ is specified as a positive number with one of the following
2062 Example: to select messages less than 1 month old, you would use
2064 Limit to messages matching: ~d <1m
2069 <bf/Note:/ all dates used when searching are relative to the
2070 <bf/local/ time zone, so unless you change the setting of your <ref
2071 id="index_format" name="$index_format"> to include a
2072 <tt/%[...]/ format, these are <bf/not/ the dates shown
2078 Sometimes it is desirable to perform an operation on a group of
2079 messages all at once rather than one at a time. An example might be
2080 to save messages to a mailing list to a separate folder, or to
2081 delete all messages with a given subject. To tag all messages
2082 matching a pattern, use the tag-pattern function, which is bound to
2083 ``shift-T'' by default. Or you can select individual messages by
2084 hand using the ``tag-message'' function, which is bound to ``t'' by
2085 default. See <ref id="patterns" name="patterns"> for Mutt's pattern
2088 Once you have tagged the desired messages, you can use the
2089 ``tag-prefix'' operator, which is the ``;'' (semicolon) key by default.
2090 When the ``tag-prefix'' operator is used, the <bf/next/ operation will
2091 be applied to all tagged messages if that operation can be used in that
2092 manner. If the <ref id="auto_tag" name="$auto_tag">
2093 variable is set, the next operation applies to the tagged messages
2094 automatically, without requiring the ``tag-prefix''.
2096 In <ref id="macro" name="macros"> or <ref id="push" name="push"> commands,
2097 you can use the ``tag-prefix-cond'' operator. If there are no tagged
2098 messages, mutt will "eat" the rest of the macro to abort it's execution.
2099 Mutt will stop "eating" the macro when it encounters the ``end-cond''
2100 operator; after this operator the rest of the macro will be executed as
2103 <sect1>Using Hooks<label id="hooks">
2105 A <em/hook/ is a concept borrowed from the EMACS editor which allows you to
2106 execute arbitrary commands before performing some operation. For example,
2107 you may wish to tailor your configuration based upon which mailbox you are
2108 reading, or to whom you are sending mail. In the Mutt world, a <em/hook/
2109 consists of a <ref id="regexp" name="regular expression"> or
2110 <ref id="patterns" name="pattern"> along with a
2111 configuration option/command. See
2113 <item><ref id="folder-hook" name="folder-hook">
2114 <item><ref id="send-hook" name="send-hook">
2115 <item><ref id="message-hook" name="message-hook">
2116 <item><ref id="save-hook" name="save-hook">
2117 <item><ref id="mbox-hook" name="mbox-hook">
2118 <item><ref id="fcc-hook" name="fcc-hook">
2119 <item><ref id="fcc-save-hook" name="fcc-save-hook">
2121 for specific details on each type of <em/hook/ available.
2123 <bf/Note:/ if a hook changes configuration settings, these changes remain
2124 effective until the end of the current mutt session. As this is generally
2125 not desired, a default hook needs to be added before all other hooks to
2126 restore configuration defaults. Here is an example with send-hook and the
2130 send-hook . 'unmy_hdr From:'
2131 send-hook ~C'^b@b\.b$' my_hdr from: c@c.c
2134 <sect2>Message Matching in Hooks<label id="pattern_hook">
2136 Hooks that act upon messages (<tt/send-hook, save-hook, fcc-hook,
2137 message-hook/) are evaluated in a slightly different manner. For the other
2138 types of hooks, a <ref id="regexp" name="regular expression"> is
2139 sufficient. But in dealing with messages a finer grain of control is
2140 needed for matching since for different purposes you want to match
2143 Mutt allows the use of the <ref id="patterns" name="search pattern">
2144 language for matching messages in hook commands. This works in
2145 exactly the same way as it would when <em/limiting/ or
2146 <em/searching/ the mailbox, except that you are restricted to those
2147 operators which match information mutt extracts from the header of
2148 the message (i.e. from, to, cc, date, subject, etc.).
2150 For example, if you wanted to set your return address based upon sending
2151 mail to a specific address, you could do something like:
2153 send-hook '~t ^me@cs\.hmc\.edu$' 'my_hdr From: Mutt User <user@host>'
2155 which would execute the given command when sending mail to
2158 However, it is not required that you write the pattern to match using the
2159 full searching language. You can still specify a simple <em/regular
2160 expression/ like the other hooks, in which case Mutt will translate your
2161 pattern into the full language, using the translation specified by the
2162 <ref id="default_hook" name="$default_hook"> variable. The
2163 pattern is translated at the time the hook is declared, so the value of
2164 <ref id="default_hook" name="$default_hook"> that is in effect
2165 at that time will be used.
2167 <sect1>Usind the sidebar<label id="sidebar">
2169 The sidebar allows you to use a mailbox listing which looks very
2170 similiar to the ones you can the in GUI mail clients.
2171 The sidebar lists all specified mailboxes, shows the number in each
2172 and highlights the ones with new email
2173 Use the following commands:
2175 set sidebar_visible="yes"
2176 set sidebar_width=25
2179 If you want to specify the mailboxes you can do so with:
2188 You can also specify the colors for mailboxes with new mails by using:
2190 color sidebar_new red black
2193 The available functions are:
2195 sidebar-scroll-up Scrolls the mailbox list up 1 page
2196 sidebar-scroll-down Scrolls the mailbox list down 1 page
2197 sidebar-next Hilights the next mailbox
2198 sidebar-next-new Hilights the next mailbox with new mail
2199 sidebar-previous Hilights the previous mailbox
2200 sidebar-open Opens the currently hilighted mailbox
2203 <sect1>External Address Queries<label id="query">
2205 Mutt supports connecting to external directory databases such as LDAP,
2206 ph/qi, bbdb, or NIS through a wrapper script which connects to mutt
2207 using a simple interface. Using the <ref id="query_command"
2208 name="$query_command"> variable, you specify the wrapper
2209 command to use. For example:
2212 set query_command = "mutt_ldap_query.pl '%s'"
2215 The wrapper script should accept the query on the command-line. It
2216 should return a one line message, then each matching response on a
2217 single line, each line containing a tab separated address then name then
2218 some other optional information. On error, or if there are no matching
2219 addresses, return a non-zero exit code and a one line error message.
2221 An example multiple response output:
2223 Searching database ... 20 entries ... 3 matching:
2224 me@cs.hmc.edu Michael Elkins mutt dude
2225 blong@fiction.net Brandon Long mutt and more
2226 roessler@guug.de Thomas Roessler mutt pgp
2229 There are two mechanisms for accessing the query function of mutt. One
2230 is to do a query from the index menu using the query function (default: Q).
2231 This will prompt for a query, then bring up the query menu which will
2232 list the matching responses. From the query menu, you can select
2233 addresses to create aliases, or to mail. You can tag multiple addresses
2234 to mail, start a new query, or have a new query appended to the current
2237 The other mechanism for accessing the query function is for address
2238 completion, similar to the alias completion. In any prompt for address
2239 entry, you can use the complete-query function (default: ^T) to run a
2240 query based on the current address you have typed. Like aliases, mutt
2241 will look for what you have typed back to the last space or comma. If
2242 there is a single response for that query, mutt will expand the address
2243 in place. If there are multiple responses, mutt will activate the query
2244 menu. At the query menu, you can select one or more addresses to be
2245 added to the prompt.
2247 <sect1>Mailbox Formats
2249 Mutt supports reading and writing of four different mailbox formats:
2250 mbox, MMDF, MH and Maildir. The mailbox type is autodetected, so there
2251 is no need to use a flag for different mailbox types. When creating new
2252 mailboxes, Mutt uses the default specified with the <ref id="mbox_type"
2253 name="$mbox_type"> variable.
2255 <bf/mbox/. This is the most widely used mailbox format for UNIX. All
2256 messages are stored in a single file. Each message has a line of the form:
2259 From me@cs.hmc.edu Fri, 11 Apr 1997 11:44:56 PST
2262 to denote the start of a new message (this is often referred to as the
2263 ``From_'' line).
2265 <bf/MMDF/. This is a variant of the <em/mbox/ format. Each message is
2266 surrounded by lines containing ``^A^A^A^A'' (four control-A's).
2268 <bf/MH/. A radical departure from <em/mbox/ and <em/MMDF/, a mailbox
2269 consists of a directory and each message is stored in a separate file.
2270 The filename indicates the message number (however, this is may not
2271 correspond to the message number Mutt displays). Deleted messages are
2272 renamed with a comma (,) prepended to the filename. <bf/Note:/ Mutt
2273 detects this type of mailbox by looking for either <tt/.mh_sequences/
2274 or <tt/.xmhcache/ (needed to distinguish normal directories from MH
2277 <bf/Maildir/. The newest of the mailbox formats, used by the Qmail MTA (a
2278 replacement for sendmail). Similar to <em/MH/, except that it adds three
2279 subdirectories of the mailbox: <em/tmp/, <em/new/ and <em/cur/. Filenames
2280 for the messages are chosen in such a way they are unique, even when two
2281 programs are writing the mailbox over NFS, which means that no file locking
2284 <sect1>Mailbox Shortcuts<label id="shortcuts">
2286 There are a number of built in shortcuts which refer to specific mailboxes.
2287 These shortcuts can be used anywhere you are prompted for a file or mailbox
2291 <item>! -- refers to your <ref id="spoolfile" name="$spoolfile"> (incoming) mailbox
2292 <item>> -- refers to your <ref id="mbox" name="$mbox"> file
2293 <item>< -- refers to your <ref id="record" name="$record"> file
2294 <item>- or !! -- refers to the file you've last visited
2295 <item>˜ -- refers to your home directory
2296 <item>= or + -- refers to your <ref id="folder" name="$folder"> directory
2297 <item>@<em/alias/ -- refers to the <ref id="save-hook"
2298 name="default save folder"> as determined by the address of the alias
2301 <sect1>Handling Mailing Lists<label id="using_lists">
2304 Mutt has a few configuration options that make dealing with large
2305 amounts of mail easier. The first thing you must do is to let Mutt
2306 know what addresses you consider to be mailing lists (technically
2307 this does not have to be a mailing list, but that is what it is most
2308 often used for), and what lists you are subscribed to. This is
2309 accomplished through the use of the <ref id="lists"
2310 name="lists and subscribe"> commands in your muttrc.
2312 Now that Mutt knows what your mailing lists are, it can do several
2313 things, the first of which is the ability to show the name of a list
2314 through which you received a message (i.e., of a subscribed list) in
2315 the <em/index/ menu display. This is useful to distinguish between
2316 personal and list mail in the same mailbox. In the <ref id="index_format"
2317 name="$index_format"> variable, the escape ``%L''
2318 will return the string ``To <list>'' when ``list'' appears in the
2319 ``To'' field, and ``Cc <list>'' when it appears in the ``Cc''
2320 field (otherwise it returns the name of the author).
2322 Often times the ``To'' and ``Cc'' fields in mailing list messages
2323 tend to get quite large. Most people do not bother to remove the
2324 author of the message they are reply to from the list, resulting in
2325 two or more copies being sent to that person. The ``list-reply''
2326 function, which by default is bound to ``L'' in the <em/index/ menu
2327 and <em/pager/, helps reduce the clutter by only replying to the
2328 known mailing list addresses instead of all recipients (except as
2329 specified by <tt/Mail-Followup-To/, see below).
2331 Mutt also supports the <tt/Mail-Followup-To/ header. When you send
2332 a message to a list of recipients which includes one or several
2333 subscribed mailing lists, and if the <ref id="followup_to"
2334 name="$followup_to"> option is set, mutt will generate
2335 a Mail-Followup-To header which contains all the recipients to whom
2336 you send this message, but not your address. This indicates that
2337 group-replies or list-replies (also known as ``followups'') to this
2338 message should only be sent to the original recipients of the
2339 message, and not separately to you - you'll receive your copy through
2340 one of the mailing lists you are subscribed to.
2342 Conversely, when group-replying or list-replying to a message which
2343 has a <tt/Mail-Followup-To/ header, mutt will respect this header if
2344 the <ref id="honor_followup_to"
2345 name="$honor_followup_to"> configuration
2346 variable is set. Using list-reply will in this case also make sure
2347 that the reply goes to the mailing list, even if it's not specified
2348 in the list of recipients in the <tt/Mail-Followup-To/.
2350 Note that, when header editing is enabled, you can create a
2351 <tt/Mail-Followup-To/ header manually. Mutt will only auto-generate
2352 this header if it doesn't exist when you send the message.
2355 The other method some mailing list admins use is to generate a
2356 ``Reply-To'' field which points back to the mailing list address rather
2357 than the author of the message. This can create problems when trying
2358 to reply directly to the author in private, since most mail clients
2359 will automatically reply to the address given in the ``Reply-To''
2360 field. Mutt uses the <ref id="reply_to" name="$reply_to">
2361 variable to help decide which address to use. If set to <em/ask-yes/ or
2362 <em/ask-no/, you will be
2363 prompted as to whether or not you would like to use the address given in
2364 the ``Reply-To'' field, or reply directly to the address given in the
2365 ``From'' field. When set to <em/yes/, the ``Reply-To'' field will be used when
2368 The ``X-Label:'' header field can be used to further identify mailing
2369 lists or list subject matter (or just to annotate messages
2370 individually). The <ref id="index_format"
2371 name="$index_format"> variable's ``%y'' and
2372 ``%Y'' escapes can be used to expand ``X-Label:'' fields in the
2373 index, and Mutt's pattern-matcher can match regular expressions to
2374 ``X-Label:'' fields with the ``~y'' selector. ``X-Label:'' is not a
2375 standard message header field, but it can easily be inserted by procmail
2376 and other mail filtering agents.
2378 Lastly, Mutt has the ability to <ref id="sort" name="sort"> the mailbox into
2379 <ref id="threads" name="threads">. A thread is a group of messages which all relate to the same
2380 subject. This is usually organized into a tree-like structure where a
2381 message and all of its replies are represented graphically. If you've ever
2382 used a threaded news client, this is the same concept. It makes dealing
2383 with large volume mailing lists easier because you can easily delete
2384 uninteresting threads and quickly find topics of value.
2386 <sect1>Editing threads
2388 Mutt has the ability to dynamically restructure threads that are broken
2389 either by misconfigured software or bad behaviour from some
2390 correspondents. This allows to clean your mailboxes formats) from these
2391 annoyances which make it hard to follow a discussion.
2393 If you want to use these functions with IMAP, you need to compile Mutt
2394 with the <em/--enable-imap-edit-threads/ configure flag.
2396 <sect2>Linking threads
2399 Some mailers tend to "forget" to correctly set the "In-Reply-To:" and
2400 "References:" headers when replying to a message. This results in broken
2401 discussions because Mutt has not enough information to guess the correct
2403 You can fix this by tagging the reply, then moving to the parent message
2404 and using the ``link-threads'' function (bound to & by default). The
2405 reply will then be connected to this "parent" message.
2407 You can also connect multiple childs at once, tagging them and using the
2408 tag-prefix command (';') or the auto_tag option.
2410 <sect2>Breaking threads
2413 On mailing lists, some people are in the bad habit of starting a new
2414 discussion by hitting "reply" to any message from the list and changing
2415 the subject to a totally unrelated one.
2416 You can fix such threads by using the ``break-thread'' function (bound
2417 by default to #), which will turn the subthread starting from the
2418 current message into a whole different thread.
2420 <sect1>Delivery Status Notification (DSN) Support
2423 RFC1894 defines a set of MIME content types for relaying information
2424 about the status of electronic mail messages. These can be thought of as
2425 ``return receipts.'' Berkeley sendmail 8.8.x currently has some command
2426 line options in which the mail client can make requests as to what type
2427 of status messages should be returned.
2429 To support this, there are two variables. <ref id="dsn_notify"
2430 name="$dsn_notify"> is used to request receipts for
2431 different results (such as failed message, message delivered, etc.).
2432 <ref id="dsn_return" name="$dsn_return"> requests how much
2433 of your message should be returned with the receipt (headers or full
2434 message). Refer to the man page on sendmail for more details on DSN.
2436 <sect1>POP3 Support (OPTIONAL)
2439 If Mutt was compiled with POP3 support (by running the <em/configure/
2440 script with the <em/--enable-pop/ flag), it has the ability to work
2441 with mailboxes located on a remote POP3 server and fetch mail for local
2444 You can access the remote POP3 mailbox by selecting the folder
2445 <tt>pop://popserver/</tt>.
2447 You can select an alternative port by specifying it with the server, ie:
2448 <tt>pop://popserver:port/</tt>.
2450 You can also specify different username for each folder, ie:
2451 <tt>pop://username@popserver[:port]/</tt>.
2453 Polling for new mail is more expensive over POP3 than locally. For this
2454 reason the frequency at which Mutt will check for mail remotely can be
2456 <ref id="pop_checkinterval" name="$pop_checkinterval">
2457 variable, which defaults to every 60 seconds.
2459 If Mutt was compiled with SSL support (by running the <em/configure/
2460 script with the <em/--with-ssl/ flag), connections to POP3 servers
2461 can be encrypted. This naturally requires that the server supports
2462 SSL encrypted connections. To access a folder with POP3/SSL, you should
2463 use pops: prefix, ie:
2464 <tt>pops://[username@]popserver[:port]/</tt>.
2466 Another way to access your POP3 mail is the <em/fetch-mail/ function
2467 (default: G). It allows to connect to <ref id="pop_host"
2468 name="pop_host">, fetch all your new mail and place it in the
2469 local <ref id="spoolfile" name="spoolfile">. After this
2470 point, Mutt runs exactly as if the mail had always been local.
2472 <bf/Note:/ If you only need to fetch all messages to local mailbox
2473 you should consider using a specialized program, such as <htmlurl
2474 url="http://www.ccil.org/~esr/fetchmail" name="fetchmail">
2476 <sect1>IMAP Support (OPTIONAL)
2479 If Mutt was compiled with IMAP support (by running the <em/configure/
2480 script with the <em/--enable-imap/ flag), it has the ability to work
2481 with folders located on a remote IMAP server.
2483 You can access the remote inbox by selecting the folder
2484 <tt>imap://imapserver/INBOX</tt>, where <tt/imapserver/ is the name of the
2485 IMAP server and <tt/INBOX/ is the special name for your spool mailbox on
2486 the IMAP server. If you want to access another mail folder at the IMAP
2487 server, you should use <tt>imap://imapserver/path/to/folder</tt> where
2488 <tt>path/to/folder</tt> is the path of the folder you want to access.
2490 You can select an alternative port by specifying it with the server, ie:
2491 <tt>imap://imapserver:port/INBOX</tt>.
2493 You can also specify different username for each folder, ie:
2494 <tt>imap://username@imapserver[:port]/INBOX</tt>.
2496 If Mutt was compiled with SSL support (by running the <em/configure/
2497 script with the <em/--with-ssl/ flag), connections to IMAP servers
2498 can be encrypted. This naturally requires that the server supports
2499 SSL encrypted connections. To access a folder with IMAP/SSL, you should
2500 use <tt>imaps://[username@]imapserver[:port]/path/to/folder</tt> as your
2503 Pine-compatible notation is also supported, ie
2504 <tt>{[username@]imapserver[:port][/ssl]}path/to/folder</tt>
2506 Note that not all servers use / as the hierarchy separator. Mutt should
2507 correctly notice which separator is being used by the server and convert
2510 When browsing folders on an IMAP server, you can toggle whether to look
2511 at only the folders you are subscribed to, or all folders with the
2512 <em/toggle-subscribed/ command. See also the
2513 <ref id="imap_list_subscribed"
2514 name="$imap_list_subscribed"> variable.
2516 Polling for new mail on an IMAP server can cause noticeable delays. So, you'll
2517 want to carefully tune the
2518 <ref id="mail_check" name="$mail_check">
2520 <ref id="timeout" name="$timeout">
2521 variables. Personally I use
2526 with relatively good results over my slow modem line.
2528 Note that if you are using mbox as the mail store on UW servers prior to
2529 v12.250, the server has been reported to disconnect a client if another client
2530 selects the same folder.
2532 <sect2>The Folder Browser
2535 As of version 1.2, mutt supports browsing mailboxes on an IMAP
2536 server. This is mostly the same as the local file browser, with the
2537 following differences:
2539 <item>In lieu of file permissions, mutt displays the string "IMAP",
2540 possibly followed by the symbol "+", indicating
2541 that the entry contains both messages and subfolders. On
2542 Cyrus-like servers folders will often contain both messages and
2544 <item>For the case where an entry can contain both messages and
2545 subfolders, the selection key (bound to <tt>enter</tt> by default)
2546 will choose to descend into the subfolder view. If you wish to view
2547 the messages in that folder, you must use <tt>view-file</tt> instead
2548 (bound to <tt>space</tt> by default).
2549 <item>You can create, delete and rename mailboxes with the
2550 <tt>create-mailbox</tt>, <tt>delete-mailbox</tt>, and
2551 <tt>rename-mailbox</tt> commands (default bindings: <tt>C</tt>,
2552 <tt>d</tt> and <tt>r</tt>, respectively). You may also
2553 <tt>subscribe</tt> and <tt>unsubscribe</tt> to mailboxes (normally
2554 these are bound to <tt>s</tt> and <tt>u</tt>, respectively).
2557 <sect2>Authentication
2560 Mutt supports four authentication methods with IMAP servers: SASL,
2561 GSSAPI, CRAM-MD5, and LOGIN (there is a patch by Grant Edwards to add
2562 NTLM authentication for you poor exchange users out there, but it has
2563 yet to be integrated into the main tree). There is also support for
2564 the pseudo-protocol ANONYMOUS, which allows you to log in to a public
2565 IMAP server without having an account. To use ANONYMOUS, simply make
2566 your username blank or "anonymous".
2568 SASL is a special super-authenticator, which selects among several protocols
2569 (including GSSAPI, CRAM-MD5, ANONYMOUS, and DIGEST-MD5) the most secure
2570 method available on your host and the server. Using some of these methods
2571 (including DIGEST-MD5 and possibly GSSAPI), your entire session will be
2572 encrypted and invisible to those teeming network snoops. It is the best
2573 option if you have it. To use it, you must have the Cyrus SASL library
2574 installed on your system and compile mutt with the <em/--with-sasl/ flag.
2576 Mutt will try whichever methods are compiled in and available on the server,
2577 in the following order: SASL, ANONYMOUS, GSSAPI, CRAM-MD5, LOGIN.
2579 There are a few variables which control authentication:
2581 <item><ref id="imap_user" name="$imap_user"> - controls
2582 the username under which you request authentication on the IMAP server,
2583 for all authenticators. This is overridden by an explicit username in
2584 the mailbox path (ie by using a mailbox name of the form
2586 <item><ref id="imap_pass" name="$imap_pass"> - a
2587 password which you may preset, used by all authentication methods where
2588 a password is needed.
2589 <item><ref id="imap_authenticators"
2590 name="$imap_authenticators"> - a colon-delimited list of IMAP
2591 authentication methods to try, in the order you wish to try them. If
2592 specified, this overrides mutt's default (attempt everything, in the order
2596 <sect1>Managing multiple IMAP/POP accounts (OPTIONAL)<label id="account-hook">
2599 If you happen to have accounts on multiple IMAP and/or POP servers,
2600 you may find managing all the authentication settings inconvenient and
2601 error-prone. The account-hook command may help. This hook works like
2602 folder-hook but is invoked whenever you access a remote mailbox
2603 (including inside the folder browser), not just when you open the
2609 account-hook . 'unset imap_user; unset imap_pass; unset tunnel'
2610 account-hook imap://host1/ 'set imap_user=me1 imap_pass=foo'
2611 account-hook imap://host2/ 'set tunnel="ssh host2 /usr/libexec/imapd"'
2614 <sect1>Start a WWW Browser on URLs (EXTERNAL)<label id="urlview">
2616 If a message contains URLs (<em/unified resource locator/ = address in the
2617 WWW space like <em>http://www.mutt.org/</em>), it is efficient to get
2618 a menu with all the URLs and start a WWW browser on one of them. This
2619 functionality is provided by the external urlview program which can be
2620 retrieved at <htmlurl url="ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/contrib/"
2621 name="ftp://ftp.mutt.org/mutt/contrib/"> and the configuration commands:
2623 macro index \cb |urlview\n
2624 macro pager \cb |urlview\n
2627 <sect1>Compressed folders Support (OPTIONAL)
2630 If Mutt was compiled with compressed folders support (by running the
2631 <em/configure/ script with the <em/--enable-compressed/ flag), Mutt
2632 can open folders stored in an arbitrary format, provided that the user
2633 has a script to convert from/to this format to one of the accepted.
2635 The most common use is to open compressed archived folders e.g. with
2638 In addition, the user can provide a script that gets a folder in an
2639 accepted format and appends its context to the folder in the
2640 user-defined format, which may be faster than converting the entire
2641 folder to the accepted format, appending to it and converting back to
2642 the user-defined format.
2644 There are three hooks defined (<ref id="open-hook" name="open-hook">,
2645 <ref id="close-hook" name="close-hook"> and <ref id="append-hook"
2646 name="append-hook">) which define commands to uncompress and compress
2647 a folder and to append messages to an existing compressed folder
2653 open-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -cd %f > %t"
2654 close-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t > %f"
2655 append-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t >> %f"
2658 You do not have to specify all of the commands. If you omit <ref
2659 id="append-hook" name="append-hook">, the folder will be open and
2660 closed again each time you will add to it. If you omit <ref
2661 id="close-hook" name="close-hook"> (or give empty command) , the
2662 folder will be open in the mode. If you specify <ref
2663 id="append-hook" name="append-hook"> though you'll be able to append
2666 Note that Mutt will only try to use hooks if the file is not in one of
2667 the accepted formats. In particular, if the file is empty, mutt
2668 supposes it is not compressed. This is important because it allows the
2669 use of programs that do not have well defined extensions. Just use
2670 &dquot;.&dquot; as a regexp. But this may be surprising if your
2671 compressing script produces empty files. In this situation, unset <ref
2672 id="save_empty" name="$save_empty">, so that the compressed file
2673 will be removed if you delete all of the messages.
2675 <sect2>Open a compressed mailbox for reading<label id="open-hook">
2677 Usage: <tt/open-hook/ <em/regexp/ &dquot;<em/command/&dquot;
2679 The <em/command/ is the command that can be used for opening the
2680 folders whose names match <em/regexp/.
2682 The <em/command/ string is the printf-like format string, and it
2683 should accept two parameters: %f, which is replaced with the
2684 (compressed) folder name, and %t which is replaced with the
2685 name of the temporary folder to which to write.
2687 %f and %t can be repeated any number of times in the
2688 command string, and all of the entries are replaced with the
2689 appropriate folder name. In addition, %% is replaced by
2690 %, as in printf, and any other %anything is left as is.
2692 The <em/command/ should <bf/not/ remove the original compressed file.
2693 The <em/command/ should return non-zero exit status if it fails, so
2694 mutt knows something's wrong.
2699 open-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -cd %f > %t"
2702 If the <em/command/ is empty, this operation is disabled for this file
2705 <sect2>Write a compressed mailbox<label id="close-hook">
2707 Usage: <tt/close-hook/ <em/regexp/ &dquot;<em/command/&dquot;
2709 This is used to close the folder that was open with the <ref id="open-hook"
2710 name="open-hook"> command after some changes were made to it.
2712 The <em/command/ string is the command that can be used for closing the
2713 folders whose names match <em/regexp/. It has the same format as in
2714 the <ref id="open-hook" name="open-hook"> command. Temporary folder
2715 in this case is the folder previously produced by the <<ref id="open-hook"
2716 name="open-hook"> command.
2718 The <em/command/ should <bf/not/ remove the decompressed file. The
2719 <em/command/ should return non-zero exit status if it fails, so mutt
2720 knows something's wrong.
2725 close-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t > %f"
2728 If the <em/command/ is empty, this operation is disabled for this file
2729 type, and the file can only be open in the readonly mode.
2731 <ref id="close-hook" name ="close-hook"> is not called when you exit
2732 from the folder if the folder was not changed.
2734 <sect2>Append a message to a compressed mailbox<label id="append-hook">
2736 Usage: <tt/append-hook/ <em/regexp/ &dquot;<em/command/&dquot;
2738 This command is used for saving to an existing compressed folder.
2739 The <em/command/ is the command that can be used for appending to the
2740 folders whose names match <em/regexp/. It has the same format as in
2741 the <ref id="open-hook" name="open-hook"> command.
2742 The temporary folder in this case contains the messages that are being
2745 The <em/command/ should <bf/not/ remove the decompressed file. The
2746 <em/command/ should return non-zero exit status if it fails, so mutt
2747 knows something's wrong.
2752 append-hook \\.gz$ "gzip -c %t >> %f"
2755 When <ref id="append-hook" name="append-hook"> is used, the folder is
2756 not opened, which saves time, but this means that we can not find out
2757 what the folder type is. Thus the default (<ref id="mbox_type"
2758 name="$mbox_type">) type is always supposed (i.e.
2759 this is the format used for the temporary folder).
2761 If the file does not exist when you save to it, <ref id="close-hook"
2762 name="close-hook"> is called, and not <ref id="append-hook"
2763 name="append-hook">. <ref id="append-hook" name="append-hook"> is only
2764 for appending to existing folders.
2766 If the <em/command/ is empty, this operation is disabled for this file
2767 type. In this case, the folder will be open and closed again (using
2768 <ref id="open-hook" name="open-hook"> and <ref id="close-hook"
2769 name="close-hook">respectively) each time you will add to it.
2771 <sect2>Encrypted folders
2773 The compressed folders support can also be used to handle encrypted
2774 folders. If you want to encrypt a folder with PGP, you may want to use
2775 the following hooks:
2778 open-hook \\.pgp$ "pgp -f < %f > %t"
2779 close-hook \\.pgp$ "pgp -fe YourPgpUserIdOrKeyId < %t > %f"
2782 Please note, that PGP does not support appending to an encrypted
2783 folder, so there is no append-hook defined.
2785 <bf/Note:/ the folder is temporary stored decrypted in the /tmp
2786 directory, where it can be read by your system administrator. So think
2787 about the security aspects of this.
2789 <sect>Mutt's MIME Support
2791 Quite a bit of effort has been made to make Mutt the premier text-mode
2792 MIME MUA. Every effort has been made to provide the functionality that
2793 the discerning MIME user requires, and the conformance to the standards
2794 wherever possible. When configuring Mutt for MIME, there are two extra
2795 types of configuration files which Mutt uses. One is the
2796 <tt/mime.types/ file, which contains the mapping of file extensions to
2797 IANA MIME types. The other is the <tt/mailcap/ file, which specifies
2798 the external commands to use for handling specific MIME types.
2800 <sect1>Using MIME in Mutt
2802 There are three areas/menus in Mutt which deal with MIME, they are the
2803 pager (while viewing a message), the attachment menu and the compose
2806 <sect2>Viewing MIME messages in the pager
2808 When you select a message from the index and view it in the pager, Mutt
2809 decodes the message to a text representation. Mutt internally supports
2810 a number of MIME types, including <tt>text/plain, text/enriched,
2811 message/rfc822, and message/news</tt>. In addition, the export
2812 controlled version of Mutt recognizes a variety of PGP MIME types,
2813 including PGP/MIME and application/pgp.
2815 Mutt will denote attachments with a couple lines describing them.
2816 These lines are of the form:
2818 [-- Attachment #1: Description --]
2819 [-- Type: text/plain, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 10000 --]
2821 Where the <tt/Description/ is the description or filename given for the
2822 attachment, and the <tt/Encoding/ is one of
2823 <tt>7bit/8bit/quoted-printable/base64/binary</tt>.
2825 If Mutt cannot deal with a MIME type, it will display a message like:
2827 [-- image/gif is unsupported (use 'v' to view this part) --]
2830 <sect2>The Attachment Menu<label id="attach_menu">
2832 The default binding for <tt/view-attachments/ is `v', which displays the
2833 attachment menu for a message. The attachment menu displays a list of
2834 the attachments in a message. From the attachment menu, you can save,
2835 print, pipe, delete, and view attachments. You can apply these
2836 operations to a group of attachments at once, by tagging the attachments
2837 and by using the ``tag-prefix'' operator. You can also reply to the
2838 current message from this menu, and only the current attachment (or the
2839 attachments tagged) will be quoted in your reply. You can view
2840 attachments as text, or view them using the mailcap viewer definition.
2842 Finally, you can apply the usual message-related functions (like
2843 <ref id="resend-message" name="resend-message">, and the reply
2844 and forward functions) to attachments of type <tt>message/rfc822</tt>.
2846 See the help on the attachment menu for more information.
2848 <sect2>The Compose Menu<label id="compose_menu">
2850 The compose menu is the menu you see before you send a message. It
2851 allows you to edit the recipient list, the subject, and other aspects
2852 of your message. It also contains a list of the attachments of your
2853 message, including the main body. From this menu, you can print, copy,
2854 filter, pipe, edit, compose, review, and rename an attachment or a
2855 list of tagged attachments. You can also modifying the attachment
2856 information, notably the type, encoding and description.
2858 Attachments appear as follows:
2860 - 1 [text/plain, 7bit, 1K] /tmp/mutt-euler-8082-0 <no description>
2861 2 [applica/x-gunzip, base64, 422K] ~/src/mutt-0.85.tar.gz <no description>
2864 The '-' denotes that Mutt will delete the file after sending (or
2865 postponing, or cancelling) the message. It can be toggled with the
2866 <tt/toggle-unlink/ command (default: u). The next field is the MIME
2867 content-type, and can be changed with the <tt/edit-type/ command
2868 (default: ^T). The next field is the encoding for the attachment,
2869 which allows a binary message to be encoded for transmission on 7bit
2870 links. It can be changed with the <tt/edit-encoding/ command
2871 (default: ^E). The next field is the size of the attachment,
2872 rounded to kilobytes or megabytes. The next field is the filename,
2873 which can be changed with the <tt/rename-file/ command (default: R).
2874 The final field is the description of the attachment, and can be
2875 changed with the <tt/edit-description/ command (default: d).
2877 <sect1>MIME Type configuration with <tt/mime.types/
2879 When you add an attachment to your mail message, Mutt searches your
2880 personal mime.types file at <tt>${HOME}/.mime.types</tt>, and then
2881 the system mime.types file at <tt>/usr/local/share/mutt/mime.types</tt> or
2882 <tt>/etc/mime.types</tt>
2884 The mime.types file consist of lines containing a MIME type and a space
2885 separated list of extensions. For example:
2887 application/postscript ps eps
2889 audio/x-aiff aif aifc aiff
2891 A sample <tt/mime.types/ file comes with the Mutt distribution, and
2892 should contain most of the MIME types you are likely to use.
2894 If Mutt can not determine the mime type by the extension of the file you
2895 attach, it will look at the file. If the file is free of binary
2896 information, Mutt will assume that the file is plain text, and mark it
2897 as <tt>text/plain</tt>. If the file contains binary information, then Mutt will
2898 mark it as <tt>application/octet-stream</tt>. You can change the MIME
2899 type that Mutt assigns to an attachment by using the <tt/edit-type/
2900 command from the compose menu (default: ^T). The MIME type is actually a
2901 major mime type followed by the sub-type, separated by a '/'. 6 major
2902 types: application, text, image, video, audio, and model have been approved
2903 after various internet discussions. Mutt recognises all of these if the
2904 appropriate entry is found in the mime.types file. It also recognises other
2905 major mime types, such as the chemical type that is widely used in the
2906 molecular modelling community to pass molecular data in various forms to
2907 various molecular viewers. Non-recognised mime types should only be used
2908 if the recipient of the message is likely to be expecting such attachments.
2910 <sect1>MIME Viewer configuration with <tt/mailcap/
2912 Mutt supports RFC 1524 MIME Configuration, in particular the Unix
2913 specific format specified in Appendix A of RFC 1524. This file format
2914 is commonly referred to as the mailcap format. Many MIME compliant
2915 programs utilize the mailcap format, allowing you to specify handling
2916 for all MIME types in one place for all programs. Programs known to
2917 use this format include Netscape, XMosaic, lynx and metamail.
2919 In order to handle various MIME types that Mutt can not handle
2920 internally, Mutt parses a series of external configuration files to
2921 find an external handler. The default search string for these files
2922 is a colon delimited list set to
2924 ${HOME}/.mailcap:/usr/local/share/mutt/mailcap:/etc/mailcap:/etc/mailcap:/usr/etc/mailcap:/usr/local/etc/mailcap
2926 where <tt/$HOME/ is your home directory.
2928 In particular, the metamail distribution will install a mailcap file,
2929 usually as <tt>/usr/local/etc/mailcap</tt>, which contains some baseline
2932 <sect2>The Basics of the mailcap file
2934 A mailcap file consists of a series of lines which are comments, blank,
2937 A comment line consists of a # character followed by anything you want.
2939 A blank line is blank.
2941 A definition line consists of a content type, a view command, and any
2942 number of optional fields. Each field of a definition line is divided
2943 by a semicolon ';' character.
2945 The content type is specified in the MIME standard type/subtype method.
2947 <tt>text/plain, text/html, image/gif, </tt>
2948 etc. In addition, the mailcap format includes two formats for
2949 wildcards, one using the special '*' subtype, the other is the implicit
2950 wild, where you only include the major type. For example, <tt>image/*</tt>, or
2951 <tt>video,</tt> will match all image types and video types,
2954 The view command is a Unix command for viewing the type specified. There
2955 are two different types of commands supported. The default is to send
2956 the body of the MIME message to the command on stdin. You can change
2957 this behaviour by using %s as a parameter to your view command.
2958 This will cause Mutt to save the body of the MIME message to a temporary
2959 file, and then call the view command with the %s replaced by
2960 the name of the temporary file. In both cases, Mutt will turn over the
2961 terminal to the view program until the program quits, at which time Mutt
2962 will remove the temporary file if it exists.
2964 So, in the simplest form, you can send a text/plain message to the
2965 external pager more on stdin:
2969 Or, you could send the message as a file:
2973 Perhaps you would like to use lynx to interactively view a text/html
2978 In this case, lynx does not support viewing a file from stdin, so you
2979 must use the %s syntax.
2980 <bf/Note:/ <em>Some older versions of lynx contain a bug where they
2981 will check the mailcap file for a viewer for text/html. They will find
2982 the line which calls lynx, and run it. This causes lynx to continuously
2983 spawn itself to view the object.</em>
2985 On the other hand, maybe you don't want to use lynx interactively, you
2986 just want to have it convert the text/html to text/plain, then you can
2989 text/html; lynx -dump %s | more
2992 Perhaps you wish to use lynx to view text/html files, and a pager on
2993 all other text formats, then you would use the following:
2998 This is the simplest form of a mailcap file.
3000 <sect2>Secure use of mailcap
3002 The interpretion of shell meta-characters embedded in MIME parameters
3003 can lead to security problems in general. Mutt tries to quote parameters
3004 in expansion of %s syntaxes properly, and avoids risky characters by
3005 substituting them, see the <ref id="mailcap_sanitize"
3006 name="mailcap_sanitize"> variable.
3008 Although mutt's procedures to invoke programs with mailcap seem to be
3009 safe, there are other applications parsing mailcap, maybe taking less care
3010 of it. Therefore you should pay attention to the following rules:
3012 <em/Keep the %-expandos away from shell quoting./
3013 Don't quote them with single or double quotes. Mutt does this for
3014 you, the right way, as should any other program which interprets
3015 mailcap. Don't put them into backtick expansions. Be highly careful
3016 with eval statements, and avoid them if possible at all. Trying to fix
3017 broken behaviour with quotes introduces new leaks - there is no
3018 alternative to correct quoting in the first place.
3020 If you have to use the %-expandos' values in context where you need
3021 quoting or backtick expansions, put that value into a shell variable
3022 and reference the shell variable where necessary, as in the following
3023 example (using <tt/$charset/ inside the backtick expansion is safe,
3024 since it is not itself subject to any further expansion):
3027 text/test-mailcap-bug; cat %s; copiousoutput; test=charset=%{charset} \
3028 && test "`echo $charset | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`" != iso-8859-1
3031 <sect2>Advanced mailcap Usage
3034 <sect3>Optional Fields
3036 In addition to the required content-type and view command fields, you
3037 can add semi-colon ';' separated fields to set flags and other options.
3038 Mutt recognizes the following optional fields:
3041 This flag tells Mutt that the command passes possibly large amounts of
3042 text on stdout. This causes Mutt to invoke a pager (either the internal
3043 pager or the external pager defined by the pager variable) on the output
3044 of the view command. Without this flag, Mutt assumes that the command
3045 is interactive. One could use this to replace the pipe to <tt>more</tt>
3046 in the <tt>lynx -dump</tt> example in the Basic section:
3048 text/html; lynx -dump %s ; copiousoutput
3050 This will cause lynx to format the text/html output as text/plain
3051 and Mutt will use your standard pager to display the results.
3053 Mutt uses this flag when viewing attachments with <ref id="auto_view"
3054 name="autoview">, in order to decide whether it should honor the setting
3055 of the <ref id="wait_key" name="$wait_key"> variable or
3056 not. When an attachment is viewed using an interactive program, and the
3057 corresponding mailcap entry has a <em/needsterminal/ flag, Mutt will use
3058 <ref id="wait_key" name="$wait_key"> and the exit status
3059 of the program to decide if it will ask you to press a key after the
3060 external program has exited. In all other situations it will not prompt
3062 <tag>compose=<command></tag>
3063 This flag specifies the command to use to create a new attachment of a
3064 specific MIME type. Mutt supports this from the compose menu.
3065 <tag>composetyped=<command></tag>
3066 This flag specifies the command to use to create a new attachment of a
3067 specific MIME type. This command differs from the compose command in
3068 that mutt will expect standard MIME headers on the data. This can be
3069 used to specify parameters, filename, description, etc. for a new
3070 attachment. Mutt supports this from the compose menu.
3071 <tag>print=<command></tag>
3072 This flag specifies the command to use to print a specific MIME type.
3073 Mutt supports this from the attachment and compose menus.
3074 <tag>edit=<command></tag>
3075 This flag specifies the command to use to edit a specific MIME type.
3076 Mutt supports this from the compose menu, and also uses it to compose
3077 new attachments. Mutt will default to the defined editor for text
3079 <tag>nametemplate=<template></tag>
3080 This field specifies the format for the file denoted by %s in the
3081 command fields. Certain programs will require a certain file extension,
3082 for instance, to correctly view a file. For instance, lynx will only
3083 interpret a file as <tt>text/html</tt> if the file ends in <tt/.html/.
3084 So, you would specify lynx as a <tt>text/html</tt> viewer with a line in
3085 the mailcap file like:
3087 text/html; lynx %s; nametemplate=%s.html
3089 <tag>test=<command></tag>
3090 This field specifies a command to run to test whether this mailcap
3091 entry should be used. The command is defined with the command expansion
3092 rules defined in the next section. If the command returns 0, then the
3093 test passed, and Mutt uses this entry. If the command returns non-zero,
3094 then the test failed, and Mutt continues searching for the right entry.
3095 <bf/Note:/ <em>the content-type must match before Mutt performs the test.</em>
3098 text/html; netscape -remote 'openURL(%s)' ; test=RunningX
3101 In this example, Mutt will run the program RunningX which will return 0
3102 if the X Window manager is running, and non-zero if it isn't. If
3103 RunningX returns 0, then Mutt will call netscape to display the
3104 text/html object. If RunningX doesn't return 0, then Mutt will go on
3105 to the next entry and use lynx to display the text/html object.
3110 When searching for an entry in the mailcap file, Mutt will search for
3111 the most useful entry for its purpose. For instance, if you are
3112 attempting to print an <tt>image/gif</tt>, and you have the following
3113 entries in your mailcap file, Mutt will search for an entry with the
3117 image/gif; ; print= anytopnm %s | pnmtops | lpr; \
3120 Mutt will skip the <tt>image/*</tt> entry and use the <tt>image/gif</tt>
3121 entry with the print command.
3123 In addition, you can use this with <ref id="auto_view" name="Autoview">
3124 to denote two commands for viewing an attachment, one to be viewed
3125 automatically, the other to be viewed interactively from the attachment
3126 menu. In addition, you can then use the test feature to determine which
3127 viewer to use interactively depending on your environment.
3129 text/html; netscape -remote 'openURL(%s)' ; test=RunningX
3130 text/html; lynx %s; nametemplate=%s.html
3131 text/html; lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
3133 For <ref id="auto_view" name="Autoview">, Mutt will choose the third
3134 entry because of the copiousoutput tag. For interactive viewing, Mutt
3135 will run the program RunningX to determine if it should use the first
3136 entry. If the program returns non-zero, Mutt will use the second entry
3137 for interactive viewing.
3139 <sect3>Command Expansion
3141 The various commands defined in the mailcap files are passed to the
3142 <tt>/bin/sh</tt> shell using the system() function. Before the
3143 command is passed to <tt>/bin/sh -c</tt>, it is parsed to expand
3144 various special parameters with information from Mutt. The keywords
3148 As seen in the basic mailcap section, this variable is expanded
3149 to a filename specified by the calling program. This file contains
3150 the body of the message to view/print/edit or where the composing
3151 program should place the results of composition. In addition, the
3152 use of this keyword causes Mutt to not pass the body of the message
3153 to the view/print/edit program on stdin.
3155 Mutt will expand %t to the text representation of the content
3156 type of the message in the same form as the first parameter of the
3157 mailcap definition line, ie <tt>text/html</tt> or
3159 <tag>%{<parameter>}</tag>
3160 Mutt will expand this to the value of the specified parameter
3161 from the Content-Type: line of the mail message. For instance, if
3162 Your mail message contains:
3164 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
3166 then Mutt will expand %{charset} to iso-8859-1. The default metamail
3167 mailcap file uses this feature to test the charset to spawn an xterm
3168 using the right charset to view the message.
3169 <tag>\%</tag>
3170 This will be replaced by a %
3172 Mutt does not currently support the %F and %n keywords
3173 specified in RFC 1524. The main purpose of these parameters is for
3174 multipart messages, which is handled internally by Mutt.
3176 <sect2>Example mailcap files
3178 This mailcap file is fairly simple and standard:
3180 # I'm always running X :)
3181 video/*; xanim %s > /dev/null
3182 image/*; xv %s > /dev/null
3184 # I'm always running netscape (if my computer had more memory, maybe)
3185 text/html; netscape -remote 'openURL(%s)'
3188 This mailcap file shows quite a number of examples:
3191 # Use xanim to view all videos Xanim produces a header on startup,
3192 # send that to /dev/null so I don't see it
3193 video/*; xanim %s > /dev/null
3195 # Send html to a running netscape by remote
3196 text/html; netscape -remote 'openURL(%s)'; test=RunningNetscape
3198 # If I'm not running netscape but I am running X, start netscape on the
3200 text/html; netscape %s; test=RunningX
3202 # Else use lynx to view it as text
3205 # This version would convert the text/html to text/plain
3206 text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput
3208 # I use enscript to print text in two columns to a page
3209 text/*; more %s; print=enscript -2Gr %s
3211 # Netscape adds a flag to tell itself to view jpegs internally
3212 image/jpeg;xv %s; x-mozilla-flags=internal
3214 # Use xv to view images if I'm running X
3215 # In addition, this uses the \ to extend the line and set my editor
3217 image/*;xv %s; test=RunningX; \
3220 # Convert images to text using the netpbm tools
3221 image/*; (anytopnm %s | pnmscale -xysize 80 46 | ppmtopgm | pgmtopbm |
3222 pbmtoascii -1x2 ) 2>&1 ; copiousoutput
3224 # Send excel spreadsheets to my NT box
3225 application/ms-excel; open.pl %s
3228 <sect1>MIME Autoview<label id="auto_view">
3230 In addition to explicitly telling Mutt to view an attachment with the
3231 MIME viewer defined in the mailcap file, Mutt has support for
3232 automatically viewing MIME attachments while in the pager.
3234 To work, you must define a viewer in the mailcap file which uses the
3235 <tt/copiousoutput/ option to denote that it is non-interactive.
3236 Usually, you also use the entry to convert the attachment to a text
3237 representation which you can view in the pager.
3239 You then use the <tt/auto_view/ muttrc command to list the
3240 content-types that you wish to view automatically.
3242 For instance, if you set auto_view to:
3244 auto_view text/html application/x-gunzip application/postscript image/gif application/x-tar-gz
3247 Mutt could use the following mailcap entries to automatically view
3248 attachments of these types.
3250 text/html; lynx -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
3251 image/*; anytopnm %s | pnmscale -xsize 80 -ysize 50 | ppmtopgm | pgmtopbm | pbmtoascii ; copiousoutput
3252 application/x-gunzip; gzcat; copiousoutput
3253 application/x-tar-gz; gunzip -c %s | tar -tf - ; copiousoutput
3254 application/postscript; ps2ascii %s; copiousoutput
3257 ``unauto_view'' can be used to remove previous entries from the autoview list.
3258 This can be used with message-hook to autoview messages based on size, etc.
3259 ``unauto_view *'' will remove all previous entries.
3261 <sect1>MIME Multipart/Alternative<label id="alternative_order">
3263 Mutt has some heuristics for determining which attachment of a
3264 multipart/alternative type to display. First, mutt will check the
3265 alternative_order list to determine if one of the available types
3266 is preferred. The alternative_order list consists of a number of
3267 mimetypes in order, including support for implicit and explicit
3268 wildcards, for example:
3270 alternative_order text/enriched text/plain text application/postscript image/*
3273 Next, mutt will check if any of the types have a defined
3274 <ref id="auto_view" name="auto_view">, and use that. Failing
3275 that, Mutt will look for any text type. As a last attempt, mutt will
3276 look for any type it knows how to handle.
3278 To remove a MIME type from the <tt/alternative_order/ list, use the
3279 <tt/unalternative_order/ command.
3281 <sect1>MIME Lookup<label id="mime_lookup">
3283 Mutt's mime_lookup list specifies a list of mime-types that should not
3284 be treated according to their mailcap entry. This option is designed to
3285 deal with binary types such as application/octet-stream. When an attachment's
3286 mime-type is listed in mime_lookup, then the extension of the filename will
3287 be compared to the list of extensions in the mime.types file. The mime-type
3288 associated with this extension will then be used to process the attachment
3289 according to the rules in the mailcap file and according to any other configuration
3290 options (such as auto_view) specified. Common usage would be:
3292 mime_lookup application/octet-stream application/X-Lotus-Manuscript
3295 In addition, the unmime_lookup command may be used to disable this feature
3296 for any particular mime-type if it had been set, for example, in a global
3300 <sect1>Command line options<label id="commandline">
3302 Running <tt/mutt/ with no arguments will make Mutt attempt to read your spool
3303 mailbox. However, it is possible to read other mailboxes and
3304 to send messages from the command line as well.
3308 -a attach a file to a message
3309 -b specify a blind carbon-copy (BCC) address
3310 -c specify a carbon-copy (Cc) address
3311 -e specify a config command to be run after initilization files are read
3312 -f specify a mailbox to load
3313 -F specify an alternate file to read initialization commands
3314 -h print help on command line options
3315 -H specify a draft file from which to read a header and body
3316 -i specify a file to include in a message composition
3317 -m specify a default mailbox type
3318 -n do not read the system Muttrc
3319 -p recall a postponed message
3320 -Q query a configuration variable
3321 -R open mailbox in read-only mode
3322 -s specify a subject (enclose in quotes if it contains spaces)
3323 -v show version number and compile-time definitions
3324 -x simulate the mailx(1) compose mode
3325 -y show a menu containing the files specified by the mailboxes command
3326 -z exit immediately if there are no messages in the mailbox
3327 -Z open the first folder with new message,exit immediately if none
3330 To read messages in a mailbox
3332 <tt/mutt/ [ -nz ] [ -F <em/muttrc/ ] [ -m <em/type/ ] [ -f <em/mailbox/ ]
3334 To compose a new message
3336 <tt/mutt/ [ -n ] [ -F <em/muttrc/ ] [ -a <em/file/ ] [ -c <em/address/ ] [ -i <em/filename/ ] [ -s <em/subject/ ] <em/address/ [ <em/address/ ... ]
3338 Mutt also supports a ``batch'' mode to send prepared messages. Simply redirect
3339 input from the file you wish to send. For example,
3341 <tt>mutt -s &dquot;data set for run #2&dquot; professor@bigschool.edu
3342 < ˜/run2.dat</tt>
3344 This command will send a message to ``professor@bigschool.edu'' with a subject
3345 of ``data set for run #2''. In the body of the message will be the contents
3346 of the file ``˜/run2.dat''.
3348 <sect1>Configuration Commands<label id="commands">
3350 The following are the commands understood by mutt.
3354 <tt><ref id="account-hook" name="account-hook"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/command/
3356 <tt><ref id="alias" name="alias"></tt> <em/key/ <em/address/ [ , <em/address/, ... ]
3358 <tt><ref id="alias" name="unalias"></tt> [ * | <em/key/ ... ]
3360 <tt><ref id="alternates" name="alternates"></tt> <em/regexp/ [ <em/regexp/ ... ]
3362 <tt><ref id="alternates" name="unalternates"></tt> [ * | <em/regexp/ ... ]
3364 <tt><ref id="alternative_order" name="alternative_order"></tt> <em/mimetype/ [ <em/mimetype/ ... ]
3366 <tt><ref id="alternative_order" name="unalternative_order"></tt> <em/mimetype/ [ <em/mimetype/ ... ]
3368 <tt><ref id="append-hook" name="append-hook"></tt> <em/regexp/ <em/command/
3370 <tt><ref id="auto_view" name="auto_view"></tt> <em/mimetype/ [ <em/mimetype/ ... ]
3372 <tt><ref id="auto_view" name="unauto_view"></tt> <em/mimetype/ [ <em/mimetype/ ... ]
3374 <tt><ref id="bind" name="bind"></tt> <em/map/ <em/key/ <em/function/
3376 <tt><ref id="charset-hook" name="charset-hook"></tt> <em/alias/ <em/charset/
3378 <tt><ref id="close-hook" name="close-hook"></tt> <em/regexp/ <em/command/
3380 <tt><ref id="color" name="color"></tt> <em/object/ <em/foreground/ <em/background/ [ <em/regexp/ ]
3382 <tt><ref id="color" name="uncolor"></tt> <em/index/ <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]
3384 <tt><ref id="exec" name="exec"></tt> <em/function/ [ <em/function/ ... ]
3386 <tt><ref id="fcc-hook" name="fcc-hook"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/mailbox/
3388 <tt><ref id="fcc-save-hook" name="fcc-save-hook"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/mailbox/
3390 <tt><ref id="folder-hook" name="folder-hook"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/command/
3392 <tt><ref id="hdr_order" name="hdr_order"></tt> <em/header/ [ <em/header/ ... ]
3394 <tt><ref id="hdr_order" name="unhdr_order"></tt> <em/header/ [ <em/header/ ... ]
3396 <tt><ref id="charset-hook" name="iconv-hook"></tt> <em/charset/ <em/local-charset/
3398 <tt><ref id="ignore" name="ignore"></tt> <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]
3400 <tt><ref id="ignore" name="unignore"></tt> <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]
3402 <tt><ref id="lists" name="lists"></tt> <em/regexp/ [ <em/regexp/ ... ]
3404 <tt><ref id="lists" name="unlists"></tt> <em/regexp/ [ <em/regexp/ ... ]
3406 <tt><ref id="macro" name="macro"></tt> <em/menu/ <em/key/ <em/sequence/ [ <em/description/ ]
3408 <tt><ref id="mailboxes" name="mailboxes"></tt> <em/filename/ [ <em/filename/ ... ]
3410 <tt><ref id="mbox-hook" name="mbox-hook"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/mailbox/
3412 <tt><ref id="message-hook" name="message-hook"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/command/
3414 <tt><ref id="mime_lookup" name="mime_lookup"></tt> <em/mimetype/ [ <em/mimetype/ ... ]
3416 <tt><ref id="mime_lookup" name="unmime_lookup"></tt> <em/mimetype/ [ <em/mimetype/ ... ]
3418 <tt><ref id="color" name="mono"></tt> <em/object attribute/ [ <em/regexp/ ]
3420 <tt><ref id="color" name="unmono"></tt> <em/index/ <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]
3422 <tt><ref id="my_hdr" name="my_hdr"></tt> <em/string/
3424 <tt><ref id="my_hdr" name="unmy_hdr"></tt> <em/field/ [ <em/field/ ... ]
3426 <tt><ref id="open-hook" name="open-hook"></tt> <em/regexp/ <em/command/
3428 <tt><ref id="crypt-hook" name="crypt-hook"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/key-id/
3430 <tt><ref id="push" name="push"></tt> <em/string/
3432 <tt><ref id="set" name="reset"></tt> <em/variable/ [<em/variable/ ... ]
3434 <tt><ref id="save-hook" name="save-hook"></tt> <em/regexp/ <em/filename/
3436 <tt><ref id="score-command" name="score"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/value/
3438 <tt><ref id="score-command" name="unscore"></tt> <em/pattern/ [ <em/pattern/ ... ]
3440 <tt><ref id="send-hook" name="send-hook"></tt> <em/regexp/ <em/command/
3442 <tt><ref id="reply-hook" name="reply-hook"></tt> <em/regexp/ <em/command/
3444 <tt><ref id="set" name="set"></tt> [no|inv]<em/variable/[=<em/value/] [ <em/variable/ ... ]
3446 <tt><ref id="set" name="unset"></tt> <em/variable/ [<em/variable/ ... ]
3448 <tt><ref id="source" name="source"></tt> <em/filename/
3450 <tt><ref id="spam" name="spam"></tt> <em/pattern/ <em/format/
3452 <tt><ref id="spam" name="nospam"></tt> <em/pattern/
3454 <tt><ref id="lists" name="subscribe"></tt> <em/regexp/ [ <em/regexp/ ... ]
3456 <tt><ref id="lists" name="unsubscribe"></tt> <em/regexp/ [ <em/regexp/ ... ]
3458 <tt><ref id="set" name="toggle"></tt> <em/variable/ [<em/variable/ ... ]
3460 <tt><ref id="unhook" name="unhook"></tt> <em/hook-type/
3463 <sect1>Configuration variables<label id="variables">