Mutt is a small but very powerful text based program for reading electronic mail under unix operating systems, including support color terminals, MIME, and a threaded sorting mode.
Mutt supports most mail formats (notably both mbox and Maildir) and protocols (POP3, IMAP, etc). It also includes MIME support, notably full PGP/GPG and S/MIME integration.
Mutt is a pure Mail User Agent (MUA) and cannot send e-mail in isolation. To do this, it needs to communicate with a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) using, for example, the common Unix sendmail interface. More recently, SMTP support has been added. It also relies on external tools for composing and filtering messages. Additionally, in latest Mutt versions you can use smtp_url config vars to send your mail directly from Mutt.
Key Features
- Colour support.
- Message threading.
- MIME support (including RFC2047 support for encoded headers).
- PGP/MIME (RFC2015).
- Various features to support mailing lists, including list-reply.
- Active development community.
- POP3 support.
- IMAP support.
- Full control of message headers when composing.
- Support for multiple mailbox formats (mbox, MMDF, MH, maildir).
- Highly customizable, including keybindings and macros.
- Change configuration automatically based on recipients, current folder, etc.
- Searches using regular expressions, including an internal pattern matching language.
- Delivery Status Notification (DSN) support.
- Postpone message composition indefinitely for later recall.
- Easily include attachments when composing, even from the command line.
- Ability to specify alternate addresses for recognition of mail forwarded from other accounts, with ability to set the From: headers on replies/etc. accordingly.
- Multiple message tagging.
- Reply to or forward multiple messages at once.
- .mailrc style configuration files.
- Translation into at least 20 languages.
- Small and efficient.
Website: www.mutt.org
Support: Manual, FAQ
Developer: Michael R Elkins and others
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
mutt is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Console Email Clients | |
|---|---|
| NeoMutt | Brings together many patches to extend Mutt |
| mu4e | An extension of mu that runs a full-featured email client within Emacs |
| Himalaya | CLI email client written in Rust |
| Sup | Curses threads-with tags style email client |
| Mutt | Small but very powerful text based program |
| Alpine | Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email |
| meli | Configurable and extensible e-mail client with sane defaults |
| nmail | User interface similar to alpine / pine |
| alot | Lets notmuch handle your mailindex and uses a toolkit to render its display |
| Wanderlust | Mail/news management system with IMAP4rev1 support for Emacs |
| aerc | Billed as a "pretty good email client" |
| Cone | COnsole Newsreader And Emailer |
| matcha | Powerful, feature-rich email client for your terminal |
| bower | Curses frontend for the Notmuch email system |
| Vmail | Vim interface to Gmail |
| neatmail | Non-interactive email client |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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