Setting up Mutt

• Motivation
• Install
• Configuration
  • GMail
  • Macro to delete emails
  • GPG
  • Other
• Final Words

I have been using Gmail since college. I don’t know exactly, but it was sometime in the early 2000s. Mutt has been around this whole time and yet I have never used it. I just always assumed I would not like it because it could not display pictures. I mean, how many emails do you get, especially that are not tech related, that do not include images? I will admit I did install it one time, I can’t remember if I was able to actually get it working or not, but either way, I removed it the same day and didn’t look back. Until this week.

Motivation

I was actually motivated to try Mutt after reading a blog post about aerc. The guy actually sold Aerc pretty well. Enough that I set out to download it and install it myself. Why then did I immediately give up and try mutt instead? Two words: GPG integration. GPG integration with Aerc is presently, at best, a bit hacky.

Install

I use Ubuntu on my personal machines, so I went the easy route this time and just installed Mutt using apt.

sudo apt install mutt

I’m sure there are other ways to do it, that may even get me a newer version, but Mutt is a pretty old, and stable, piece of software. Whatever version Ubuntu gives me is almost certainly good enough.

Configuration

GMail

Setting up Gmail was really easy. Five minutes or less of Google and you can figure it out.

set from = "oliver.steven@gmail.com"
set realname = "Steven Oliver"
set imap_user = "oliver.steven@gmail.com"
set smtp_url = "smtps://oliver.steven@smtp.gmail.com"

# Remote folders
set folder = "imaps://imap.gmail.com/"
set spoolfile = "+INBOX"
set postponed = "+[Gmail]/Drafts"
set record = "+[Gmail]/Sent Mail"
set trash = "+[Gmail]/Trash"

So what about your password? That was the tricky part for me. Setting up an application password for Mutt to use with Gmail is easy. Google helpfully gives you an easy to follow How To article.

The tricky part is how to store said password on your hard drive, or worse, in your dotfiles repository without sharing your email with the entire world? This, again, is where GPG comes into play… except I did not want to use GPG for this, I wanted to use age. Why? Because chezmoi uses age, and I wanted to minimize the amount of different tools I have to keep track of in my head. In my personal opinion, age is also significantly easier to use. Which leaves you with, why did I care about GPG in the first place? Because age specifically states it was not designed to be used with email.

The first thing I did was setup age to be used with chezmoi. That’s pretty well documented, and a bit off topic for this post, so I won’t go into it here. First, create your passwords file to include in your muttrc. I simply named mine password.

# Imap settings
set imap_pass = "you app password"

# Smtp settings
set smtp_pass = "your app password"

Next, you’ll encrypt that file with age to produce a password.age file.

age -o password.age -r <your public key created with age> password

The contents of password.age should look similar to this.

age-encryption.org/v1
-> X25519 1/7OSVyRVCbCR1geEVmih4EZKsGmZnc9GkDk+NRLDio
LsQSBcuwCO+7UZtsrG5G/CVuTQOjrYkI6/K1XeNa93s
--- d57B50H1L5J+URqkt+x5AZLS1I7MoKhb/umk73TaMUQ
ÈÒ=ïÅ»‚˜hù̶ˆ¢`£0¬Sƒ‹ÁP
óÁÀÑ|™ÂHŽóÍ'»æ

Finally, you can add this line to your muttrc to have Mutt decrypt your password file for you when Mutt opens.

source "age -d -i /home/steveno/.config/chezmoi/key.txt ~/.config/mutt/passwords.age |"

Macro to delete emails

A convenience feature I implemented was writing a macro to have Mutt delete emails in a way that was similar to how GMail does so on its website. This was surprisingly easy to do. StackOverflow was of little help honestly. The method I ended up figuring out is simpler than anything they had.

macro index,pager d "<delete-message><sync-mailbox><enter>"

GPG

This was really easy. Just fix the line that has your key in it.

# Encryption
set crypt_use_gpgme = yes
set pgp_autosign = yes
set pgp_sign_as = 0x05368C44AB2AF31E
set pgp_replyencrypt = yes

Other

The last bits of my config I copied wholesale from a blog I have since lost track of. The same bits can be found just about everywhere. Similar to vim when Neovim was started, Mutt feels old and in desperate need of a refresh. Similar to Neovim, doing things like making extremely popular options the default, would probably go a long way.

set ssl_force_tls = yes
set abort_nosubject = no
set mail_check = 60
set timeout = 10
set sort = "reverse-date-received"
set signature = "~/.config/mutt/signature"
set copy = no
set menu_scroll=yes

# Auto views
auto_view text/html

Final Words

I really like Mutt so far. I am going to, at the very least, keep it installed and keep using it. There are some things I haven’t quite figured out that bother me. The biggest being how to “archive” messages. Gmail is a bit strange as an email client because folders and labels are synonymous. So moving a message from the inbox to your “All mail” folder is not an obvious task. If you Google that you’ll probably be a bit horrified to see the answers similar to how I was. Regardless, I really like Mutt and I think you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t try it too.