Back to Mutt

For the last decade I have used web based email almost exclusively for work and personal use, and in due course have accumulated a rather large email archive. Lately I have been traveling a lot, and started missing offline email, especially since the flights don't have wifi in general, so I decided to augment my online email with an offline one.

My first choice was Apple Mail. The setup and mailbox imports were a breeze, and the interface is beautiful. However the mail client crumbled under the large number of messages that I have: color beach balls were a common sight, and the client seemed to leak memory--after an hour of use, the memory footprint was roughly 2.5GB which made matters worse.

I had a similar issue with other mail clients, and while talking to a colleague at work, I remembered that I did not experience these issues with a very old mail client that I used before: mutt.  So I went back to set it up.

Mutt is not for the faint of heart, but techies should feel at home setting it up and using it. The installation is a breeze on Mac OS X, thanks to the ports system:

sudo port install mutt-devel +compress +gnuregex +gpgme +headercache +imap +pop +sasl +sidebar +smtp +ssl +tokyocabinet 

The configuration is a different story. Like most Unix programs, the installation requires editing configuration files. The first is .muttrc, that you put in your home directory. I have lost my older .muttrc, so I had to recreate it from scratch:


set realname="First Last"
set from = "email address"
set imap_user = "email address" # for google apps email
set imap_pass = "password"
set smtp_pass = "password"




set folder = "imaps://imap.gmail.com:993"
set spoolfile = "+INBOX"
set postponed ="+[Gmail]/Drafts"




set header_cache =~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir =~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set certificate_file =~/.mutt/certificates


set smtp_url = "smtp://email address@smtp.gmail.com:587/"


set sort = threads
set sort_aux = last-date-received


set signature = "~/.signature
set editor = emacsclient"


set mail_check = 15
set timeout = 15
set imap_peek=no


set imap_keepalive = 900


auto_view text/html


set print_command = muttprint

Now Mutt is ready to use. There are a couple of conveniences though that would make life a lot easier. One is handling HTML emails that a lot of people tend to use these days. You can add the following to your .mailcap file in your home directory

text/html; lynx -dump %s ; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

which allows you convert HTML emails and display them as cleaned up text inside of mutt.

The second convenience is getting your address book from Google mail. Goobook script is excellent, and the installation instructions and download links are available from here.

Lastly is adding color to mutt. While you can edit the color scheme manually, it is usually better to start from a designed scheme and customize it. I like using Solarized, and you can download the schemes directly from GitHub.

And now you're ready to roll, even with a large mailbox.