Useful Programs

List of useful programs interacting with Mutt

Mail downloading and sending

• offlineimap – read/sync your IMAP mailboxes
• imapfw – simple and powerful framework to work with mails, successor of OfflineIMAP
• fdm – fetch mail from POP3 or IMAP servers, or receive local mail from stdin, and deliver it
• getmail – simple mail retrieval agent intended as a replacement for fetchmail. Support for IMAP4, POP3 and SSL
• msmtp – is an SMTP client, supports multiple accounts, TLS/SSL, IDN, DSN and SOCKS Proxy.
• isync – may be better than Mutt with IMAP header caching.
• maildrop – mail delivery agent with filtering abilities
• postfix – a Wietse Venema’s mail server that started life at IBM research as an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Now at Google, Wietse continues to support Postfix.
• lieer – can pull email and labels (and changes to labels) from your GMail account and store them locally in a maildir with the labels synchronized with a notmuch database. The changes to tags in the notmuch database may be pushed back remotely to your GMail account.

Address books

See also: external address queries.

• mail-query to query addresses found in the inbox
• notmuch-addrlookup to query adresses indexed by notmuch
• khard to synchronize address books between your PC and mobile device with vdirsyncer.
• notmuch-abook – Notmuch address book manager for Vim
• goobook – search your Google Contacts from the command line or Mutt.
• abook – text-based address book program
• mutt-addressbook – extend Mutt’s query command using LDAP directories

• mates – a very simple, highly extensible command line address book

• mutt_ldap_query.pl to query LDAP contacts (useful as a mutt $query_tool)
• mutt-ldap.py to query LDAP contacts (useful as a mutt $query_tool)

Tagging, filtering, searching

• afew – initial tagging script for Notmuch mail
• notmuch – is a mail indexer. Essentially, is a very thin front end on top of Xapian. It provides Python, Vim, and Emacs bindings.
• spamassassin – Spam-filtering tool, uses a variety of spam-detection techniques, including DNS-based and fuzzy-checksum-based spam detection, Bayesian filtering, external programs, blacklists and online databases.
• procmail – can sort incoming mail into various directories and filter out spam messages. Procmail is stable, but no longer maintained.
• mairix – an excellent mailbox searching tool for Mutt. Unmaintained.
• nmzmail – another excellent mailbox searching tool for Mutt.
• bogofilter – mail filter that classifies mail as spam or ham (non-spam) by a statistical analysis of the message’s header and content (body). The program is able to learn from the user’s classifications and corrections.

Encryption

• passwordstore.org – password management tool which tries to be simple and follow the Unix philosophy.
• GPG, GnuPG – GNU’s Privacy Guard, a free (FOSS) replacement for PGP.

Converting text formats

• lesspipe.sh a universal terminal reader for any file format. To use it in mutt, add

  autoview text/* application/* image/* audio/*
  

  to your .muttrc and

  text/*;                           LESSQUIET=1 lesspipe.sh '%s'; copiousoutput
  application/*;                    LESSQUIET=1 lesspipe.sh '%s'; copiousoutput
  image/*;                          LESSQUIET=1 lesspipe.sh '%s'; copiousoutput
  audio/*;                          LESSQUIET=1 lesspipe.sh '%s'; copiousoutput
  

  to the file given by the value of mailcap_path.

• plainMail2HTML – plainMail2HTML enables users of Mutt (and possibly other textual Email clients) to send HTML-formatted Emails.
• antiword – Microsoft Word to TXT converter.
• rtf2html – RTF to HTML converter (which then can be piped through lynx -stdin -dump -force_html).
• pandoc – is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command line tool that uses this library.
• xlhtml – Microsoft Excel/PowerPoint to HTML converter, see rtf2html.

Grabbing URLs

• urlview – extract URLs from a text file and allow the user to select via a menu
• urlscan – Mutt and terminal URL selector (similar to urlview)
• extract_url – a Perl script that extracts URLs from correctly-encoded MIME email messages or plain text.

Calendar Tools

• mutt-ics – simple viewer for .ics files in Mutt
• mutt-ical to reply to invitations (sent as .ics file)
• vcalendar-filter to view calendar files (ics)
• mutt2khal for passing calendar items to the command-line calendar khal,
• vkhal – can display calendar items and import them into khal

Miscellaneous

• muttprint
• notifynotmuch – displays desktop notifications for unread mail in Notmuch database
• notify-osd – Canonical’s on-screen-display notification agent
  The desktop notifications framework provides a standard way of doing passive pop-up notifications on the Linux desktop. These are designed to notify the user of something without interrupting their work with a dialog box that they must close. Passive pop-ups can automatically disappear after a short period of time.
• ayatana-webmail - A desktop Notification daemon that can watch imap mailboxes using IDLE. Can also run sync commands when a new message arrives.
• mutt-vid – manage multiple sender accounts in Mutt
• mutt-trim to unclutter and normalize quoted text in an e-mail
• mailto-mutt
• mailto-mutt
• MailtoMutt? – a Cocoa application which handles mail to URLs, forwarding them to Mutt using AppleScript and Terminal.app.
• post mode – an Emacs mode for composing email or Usenet messages for an external user agent (Mutt, slrn, etc.).
• t-prot – a program to clean up various email problems (long signatures, incorrect quoting, etc.).
• mswatch use with isync to sync local and server IMAP stores to track changes as they happen.
• muttzilla – make Mutt your mail reader in Netscape or Mozilla. Unmaintained.

Vim Plugins

• vim-mutt-aliases to complete mail aliases in Vim
• mutt-query-complete.vim to complete mail addresses provided by the mutt $query_tool in Vim such asnotmuch address or mutt-ldap.py
• vim-notmuch-addrlookup to complete mail addresses indexed by notmuch.
• vim-notmuch-address – to complete mail addresses in Vim

Setup

• Konfekt’s mailcap file (read by NeoMutt to determine how to display non-text files.)
• Muttrc snippet to view mail from Mutt in GUI Browser or E-Mail client under Windows (Subsystem for Linux)