mutt-wizard

Get 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. This is via the “offline” option, but you want this.

Specifically, this wizard:

• Has a database of IMAP4/POP3 and SMTP servers and ports. If mutt-wizard doesn’t know your server’s IMAP4/POP3/SMTP, it will prompt.
• Creates dotfiles for neomutt, isync, msmtp and getmail
• Encrypts and stores locally your password using pass, 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 using crontab
• Provides sensible defaults and an attractive appearance for the neomutt email client

Install and Use

git clone https://github.com/rpuntaie/mutt-wizard
cd mutt-wizard
sudo make install

User of Arch-based distros can also install mutt-wizard from the AUR as mw-git.

The mutt-wizard is run with the command mw. Once everything is setup, you’ll use neomutt to access your mail.

• mw add -- add a new email account
• mw ls -- list existing accounts
• mw pass -- revise an account’s password
• mw delete -- deleted an added account
• mw purge -- delete all accounts and settings (DANGER)
• mw cron -- toggle/configure a cronjob to sync mail
• mw sync or mw -- sync all your emails. Optionally add the email address, to sync only one.

Dependencies

• neomutt - the email client
• isync - downloads and syncs the mail
• msmtp - sends the email
• pass - safely encrypts passwords (required at install)

There’s a chance of errors if you use a slow-release distro like Ubuntu, Debian or Mint. If you get errors in neomutt, install the most recent version manually or manually remove the offending lines in the config in /usr/share/mutt-wizard/mutt-wizard.muttrc.

Optional

• w3m - view HTML email and images in neomutt.
• notmuch - index and search mail. Install it and run notmuch setup. Tell it where your mail is ($MAILDIR or ~/Mail). Although, mw will do this automatically, if you haven’t set notmuch up before. You can run it in mutt with S. Run notmuch new to process new mail. Although, mw sync does this for you.
• libnotify/libnotify-bin - allows notifications when syncing mail with mw sync
• 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.
• pam-gnupg - this is a more general program that I use. It automatically logs you into your GPG key on login so you will never need to input your password once logged on to your system. Check out the repo and directions here.
• urlscan - outputs urls in mail to browser.

Neomutt 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 - next/previous mail, J/K same, without skipping deleted, and also when viewing mails
• ctrl-d/f/ctrl-u/b - down and up a half page / full page
• l - open mail, or attachment page or attachment
• h - the opposite of l
• dd - delete mail, u undelete
• r/gr - reply/reply all to highlighted mail
• s - save selected mail or selected attachment
• ixy - Press i followed by the two initial mailbox letters to go there
• Mxy and Cxy - For Move and Copy to the according mailbox, e.g. Msp 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.
• ga to add address/person to abook and Tab while typing address to complete one from book.
• ? - see all keyboard shortcuts
• ctrl-j/ctrl-k - move up and down in sidebar, ctrl-l opens mailbox.
• gu - open a menu to select a url you want to open in you browser (needs urlscan).
• S - search for a mail
• gl - limit by substring of subject
• gL - undo limit
• gm / gM - call mutt-wizard’s mw sync for one / all mail accounts
• ^u within input field / command line, will clear it, ^a and ^e go to beginning or end, ^g aborts

Look into /usr/share/mutt-wizard.muttrc to see all bindings.

New stuff and improvements since the original release

• honors $MAILDIR, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, $XDG_CACHE_HOME, if defined.
• gm/gM to sync mail inside mutt, as o/O has a mutt assignment already.
• Make channel name equal to email address to avoid choosing a new name for the same thing.
• 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.
• mw is now an installed program instead of just a script needed to be kept in your mutt folder.
• dialog is no longer used (le bloat) and the interface is simply text commands.
• 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 and other directories have been moved or removed, leaving a clean config folder.
• msmtp configs moved to ~/.config/ and mail default location moved to ~/Mail, reducing mess in ~.
• pass is used as a password manager instead of separately saving passwords.
• Script is POSIX sh compliant.
• Error handling for the many people who don’t read or follow directions. Less errors generally.
• Addition of a manual man mw.

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.

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

Details for Tinkerers

• The critical mutt/neomutt files are in ~/.config/mutt/ (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mutt)
• Put whatever global settings you want into muttrc. mutt-wizard will add some lines to this file which you shouldn’t remove unless you know what you’re doing. But you can move them up/down over your personal config lines if you need to. If you get binding conflict errors in mutt, you might need to do this.
• Each of the accounts that mutt-wizard generates will have custom settings set in a separate file in accounts/. You can edit these freely if you want to tinker with settings specific to an account.
• In /usr/share/mutt-wizard are several global config files, including mutt-wizard's default settings. You can overwride this in your muttrc if you wish. To avoid insertion of the line sourcing the default settings, have a commented # source /usr/share/mutt-wizard/mutt-wizard.muttrc in your muttrc.

Watch out for these things:

• For Gmail accounts, remember also to enable third-party (“““less secure”"") applications before attempting installation. You might also need to manually “Enable IMAP” in the settings.
• Protonmail accounts will require you to set up “Protonmail Bridge” to access PM’s IMAP and SMTP servers. Configure that before running mutt-wizard.
• If you have a university email, or enterprise-hosted email for work, there might be other hurdles or two-factor authentication you have to jump through. Some, for example, will want you to create a separate IMAP password, etc.
• isync is not fully UTF-8 compatible, so non-Latin characters may be garbled (although sync should succeed). mw will also not autocreate mailbox shortcuts since it is looking for English mailbox names. I strongly recommend you to set your email language to English on your mail server to avoid these problems.

To-do

• Add Mac OS/BSD compatibility (the script should work for Mac OS now)
• Out-of-the-box compatibility with Protonmail Bridge (I believe this is done, but more bug-testing is welcome since I don’t have PM)
• Option to keep configuration for accounts that failed to connect (maybe)