I heard about mutt during my very first years of Linux, 20 years ago, but I never got into it until last year. I tried to use it a few times on my different Macbook, without success. I guess I was not that much interested at the moment, or I didn’t know what mutt was capable of, or I simply couldn’t resist the macOS Mail app (and I tried many other mail applications on the Mac). No matter why, I am now using Neomutt every day, and while I’m still learning some of its advanced features, I thought I would share my experience so far.

Since I moved my whole Emacs-based setup to individual apps I needed to choose a mail reader, preferably a TUI thing since I was used to process my email from within Emacs with mu4e. From my Linux time I knew Evolution, or at least what it was in the 2000s, wouldn’t fit the bill, nor Thunderbird or anything with a ton of menus and dialog boxes. I was looking for something as lean and powerful as Vim, you get the idea. Joshua Stein uses it, why not me? I searched a little on the net and on Github to see examples of config, read and reread the documentation, to finally arrive at a configuration that satisfies me, and especially that I can use without asking myself too many questions. Processing emails is generally a boring task,¹ it might as well not take forever either.

Here are a few points that I like most in Neomutt:

• “You get what you want” (my shorthand for WYSIWYG, for CLI junkies): no artifice, you enter directly in the heart of the subject and you can read and compose your messages with the help of some keyboard shortcuts; the navigation in the folders remains as flexible as within Vim, and of course moving/deleting messages or threads is as easy as with mu4e.
• Neomutt support PGP encryption right out of the box, and it offers good support for managing multiple accounts: I started with 4 accounts, now reduced to 2 (work + private, thanks to appropriate automatic forward rules²), and it’s pretty easy to switch from one account to the other. It means that I cannot really use Notmuch facilities available in Neomutt, but since I use mu as my mail indexer I don’t feel I miss anything, especially since we can use mu search from within Neomutt.
• It looks like you are free to use whatever method you like for fetching emails, using either POP3 or IMAP settings. I personally settled upon mbsync after I encountered a few issues with offlineimap. And you may use an indexer (mu or notcmuch) or not. The only thing that really matters is whether you email in a Maildir or as mbox files.

As I said, I’m still learning about advanced features, especially those concerned with search and automatic rules. That’s pretty basic stuff everywhere else: what you generally need is goto, replace (or whatever action you want to carry on an item matching a target pattern) and full-body search functionalities.

And here are a few tricks that I learned when configuring Neomutt:

• You can bypass the ; prefix to apply commands on tagged messages by setting the auto_tag option. I don’t but in case you think it is useful, there you know.

• Moving messages isn’t obvious until you understand the difference between “copy” and “save”. As a one-liner, prefer <save-message> and bind it to a key that makes sense to you. I have this personally:

  # in general settings
  "<save-message>+archives<enter>"  \
  "Archive message (+archives)"
  
  # in account-specific settings
  macro index,pager a \
  "<save-message>+aliquote/Archive<enter>"  \
  "Archive message"
  

  This way, pressing a on a message in the index view will move it to the local “Archive” folder of the corresponding mailbox, while “A” will move the message to my general “archives” — a Maildir managed by mu with “.noupdate” flag.

• Folder hooks are tricky, since they are evaluated in order, so you must think about it carefully before asking to set specific properties for your mailboxes. I’m sure there’s a better way to do it (especially to iterate over a common pattern like ̀*/Sent), but here’s my config at the time of this writing:

  folder-hook archives/* 'set read_inc=1000'
  folder-hook archives/* 'set index_format="%[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M] [%Z %?X?A&-? %?l?%4l&%4c?] %-25.25F %s "'
  
  folder-hook aliquote/* source ~/.config/neomutt/accounts/aliquote
  folder-hook aliquote/* 'set index_format="%[!%y-%m-%d] [%Z] %-25.25F %s "'
  folder-hook aliquote/Sent "set sort=reverse-date-sent"
  folder-hook aliquote/Sent set strict_threads=yes
  
  folder-hook jussieu/* source ~/.config/neomutt/accounts/jussieu
  folder-hook jussieu/* 'set index_format="%[!%y-%m-%d] [%Z] %-25.25F %s "'
  folder-hook jussieu/Sent "set sort=reverse-date-sent"
  folder-hook jussieu/Sent set strict_threads=yes
  

  The 2nd line confirms that you can manage to have different summary views depending on the mailbox you are currently viewing, but see the next point.

• Likewise, actions on a mailbox imply that you first “enter” that mailbox, which means that to fetch all new mails you either add to write a macro which starts with <enter-command> or <shell-escape> or you need to write account-specific macros, which is what I find easier. For instance, in my .config/neomutt/accounts/aliquote file, I have the following line:

  macro index o "<shell-escape>mbsync aliquote<enter>" \
          "run mbsync to sync mail for this account"
  

  This means that when I press o while on the “aliquote” mailbox, I can fetch all related emails. On the other hand, I also have a general macro which applies to all available inboxes:

  macro index O "<shell-escape>inbox<enter>" \
          "run mbsync + mu-index to sync all accounts"
  

• If you want to keep up to date with your mailbox status, you can use this clever trick:

  set status_format = "mutt_status \" %f sort:%s msgs:%?M?%M/?%m %l%?n? new:%n?%?o? old:%o?%?d? del:%d?%?F? flag:%F?%?t? tag:%t?%?p? post:%p?%?b? inc:%b?%?l??\" \"mutt (%b)\"|"
  

  The first argument to mutt_status reflect my personal settings inside Neomutt, and the second argument simply display the name of the running app (which is what I used in my Zsh configuration³) with the number of inboxes with new mails in brackets.

• You explicitly need to “subscribe” to lists if you want to easily reply to the list rather than the sender.