mutt-wizard

Get all this great stuff without effort:

• A full-featured and autoconfigured email client on the terminal with neomutt
• Mail stored offline so you can view and write email while away from internet and keep backups

Specifically, this wizard:

• Determines your email server’s IMAP and SMTP servers and ports
• Creates dotfiles for neomutt, isync, and msmtp appropirate for your email address
• Encrypts and stores locally your password for easy remote access, accessible only by your GPG key
• Handles as many as nine separate email accounts automatically
• Auto-creates bindings to switch between accounts or between mailboxes
• Can automatically set mail updates as often as you want to sync your mail and update you when new mail arrives
• Provides sensible defaults and an attractive appearance for the neomutt email client

I maintain mutt-wizard for GNU/Linux, but individual contributors have also made it compatible with Mac.

Install and Use

git clone https://gitlab.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard ~/.config/mutt

Yes you have to put the whole repo in the mutt directory (~/.config/mutt/). Just backup or delete any previous mutt configs (or msmtp or mbsync configs if you have them; if you don’t know, you don’t have them).

Install these required programs:

• neomutt - the email client.
• isync - downloads and syncs the mail.
• msmtp - sends the email.

You also need a GPG key pair to encrypt passwords. If you don’t know what that is, just run gpg --full-gen-key (or gpg2 --full-gen-key) to get one. You might also want some good optional stuff:

• w3m - view HTML email and images in neomutt.
• notmuch - index and search mail. Install it and run notmuch setup, tell it that your mail is in ~/.local/share/mail/. You can run it in mutt with ctrl-f. Run notmuch new to process new mail, although the included mailsync script does this for you.
• abook - a terminal-based address book. Pressing tab while typing an address to send mail to will suggest contacts that are in your abook.
• A cron manager - if you want to enable the auto-sync feature.

User interface

To give you an example of the interface, here’s an idea:

• m - send mail (uses your default $EDITOR to write)
• j/k and d/u - vim-like bindings to go down and up (or d/u to go down/up a page).
• Enter - read mail
• r - reply to highlighted mail
• R - replay all to highlighted mail
• v - view attachments to select and open them s to save, Enter to open.
• gs,gi,ga,gd,gS - Press g followed by another letter to change mailbox: sent, inbox, archive, drafts, Spam, etc.
• M and C - For Move and Copy: follow them with one of the mailbox letters above, i.e. MS means “move to Spam”.
• i# - Press i followed by a number 1-9 to go to a different account. If you add 9 accounts via mutt-wizard, they will each be assigned a number.
• ? - see all keyboard shortcuts

New stuff and improvements since the original release

• isync/mbsync has replaced offlineimap as the backend. Offlineimap was error-prone, bloated, used obsolete Python 2 modules and required separate steps to install the system.
• dialog is no long used (le bloat) and the interface is simply text.
• More autogenerated shortcuts that allow quickly moving and copying mail between boxes.
• More elegant attachment handling. Image/video/pdf attachments without relying on the neomutt instance.
• abook integration by default.
• The messy template files have been removed and are now a part of the script itself.
• Optimal XDG standards compliance, moving msmtp configs to ~/.config/, moving mail to ~/.local/share/mail/ and moving mutt-wizard files to ~/.local/share/muttwizard/. isync/mbsync still uses home for default though as XDG compliance is not built into them.
• accounts/ hold account data and bin/ holds script run by or for mutt. All other directories have been disintegrated.
• Better handling of different gpg versions.
• Script is POSIX sh compliant.
• Error handling for the many people who don’t read or follow directions.

Watch our for these things:

• For Gmail accounts, remember also to enable third-party (“““less secure”"") applications before attempting installation.
• Check the ProtonMail issue on Github if you are a Protonmail user. ProtonMail recently allows IMAP usage with their Bridge program for paid users. I don’t have this, so I can’t bugtest on it, but many users have gotten it working. Either way, it requires a little more work than just using the wizard.
• Don’t expect mutt-wizard to work out the box on a university email. Universities often have special IMAP policies and server settings. You might be lucky, but you might have to changes some settings in the mbsyncrc config file to get it to work properly with a university email.
• If you use an email server whose mailboxes are not in English, mutt-wizard might not be able to guess which is which, so you may have to manually set your Inbox, Sent, Trash, Drafts, etc. in your mutt config file.

Help the Project!

• Try mutt-wizard out on weird machines and weird email addresses and report any errors.
• Open a PR to add new server information into domains.csv so their users can more easily use mutt-wizard.
• If nothing else, Donate!

See Luke’s website here. Email him at luke@lukesmith.xyz.

mutt-wizard is free/libre software, licensed under the GPLv3.