What is Mutt?

Mutt is lightweight yet very powerful text-based mail client for UNIX machines. It seems to be a combination of ELM and Mush mail clients.

What is K. Scott?

K. Scott was the SysAdmin for the Tech Computer Center and was a mush and UCBmail user for ten years. Finally, during the spring of 1999, we began moving our suns to Solaris-7 from SunOS-4.1.4. I began porting some of my legacy software (like tvtwm and mush). Someone pointed out a new mail client that; supported imap/pop/pgp/mime, was very configurable, could do colors and HTML, and most importantly it was not Pine. So, since it had been about 5 years since I changed mail programs I figured it was about time.

Compiling Mutt

Mutt seemed to compile pretty well right out of the box. My two most used platforms are ix86-Linux-2.0.33-Slackware-3.6 and SPARC-Solaris-7. Our mailserver is a linux box providing mail via POP3/IMAP/NFS.

• Most times I read mail via NFS. Linux does file locking differently so I needed the --disable-fcntl configure option.
• Next, I got slang-1.2.2 because using curses-1.0 on linux would leave the background color of my xterm gray. I normally use white on black. Configuring with --with-slang solved this. Solaris didn't seem to have this problem, but I compiled it with slang-1.2.2 anyway.
• I also used the --enable-imap --enable-pop to do obvious things.
• I removed the -pedantic option to gcc from the makefiles because it produced "protos.h:391: conflicting types for `fprintf'", and it really isnt needed anyway.
• I also added a "-R/usr/local/lib" to ld because Solaris doesn't like libraries anywhere but /usr/lib.

My muttrc

In my muttrc you will find my likes, dislikes, and tricks to get mutt to do what I need. It is pretty well commented.