Carleton webmail too slow for you? Don't like webmail? Never fear, you can check your mail quickly and easily with mutt.

Setup your mutt

If your account was created after July 2007, then you can skip this section. If it wasn't, please read these quick instructions.

A muttrc set up to work with Carleton's email service is ready for your use on Gridley. Place it in your home directory with the following commands:

cp /etc/skel/.muttrc ~/.muttrc
cp /etc/skel/.mailcap ~/.mailcap

Reading and Sending Mail

If you've never used a terminal–based mail client, your first time with mutt could be something of a shock. Start up mutt from the prompt by typing its name:

gilmanr@gridley:~$ mutt

Mutt will start itself up using the configuration file you just copied into your home directory and will ask for your Carleton password. If you're worried about typing your Carleton password into Gridley, please be assured that the communication between Carleton's mail server and Gridley are encrypted if you are using the provided configuration. Continue on to view your mail by entering your Carleton password when prompted.

Depending on how large your mailbox is, mutt may take a few moments to load everything up (getting bored waiting?). Once it has, you will be presented with a list of messages currently in your Carleton mailbox — just like if you had logged into webmail. You can navigate through the list using the up and down arrows. Try it out.

Understanding mutt

When you first open mutt, you're presented with the “index” view. Don't be scared. All that means is that you're looking at a list of all the messages in your inbox. Each message is displayed on its own line like so:

1 N Sep 02 Facebook (2.6K) Joe User wrote on your Wall...

Moving from left to right, you are presented with the following information: the message index, message status (new, old, deleted, etc.), the date it arrived, the sender, the size, and the subject. Try pressing enter on what looks like an especially interesting message.

When you hit return or enter, you tell mutt that you want to view the highlighted message. A few headers (these can be customized in your muttrc) will be displayed followed by the message body. This view that presents one message is called the “pager”. To scroll down use spacebar; backspace to scroll up.

Sending Mail

Let's assume that whatever message you were looking at is extremely critical. You'd better respond. Press 'r'. Mutt will prompt you (look at the bottom of the screen if you don't see this) for a recipient, just hit enter if you're satisfied with the value displayed. Mutt will ask you for a subject and then ask you if you want to include the original message in your reply. After you answer those three questions, an editor will pop up. By default, this will be nano. Type your message out and then press CTRL–X to save your message. When prompted to “Save modified buffer” press 'Y'.

You will now be presented with a screen describing your message. Verify that the sender, subject, CC, BCC, etc. are all as you want them, and then press 'y' to send the message. If you've changed your mind and no longer want to send a message, press 'q' to abort the message.

You can also send mail by pressing 'm' at any time.

Changing Folders

At some point, you'll probably want to look at messages you've sent, go through your spam to make sure nothing legitimate was caught, or glance at some of the other folders in your IMAP account. Mutt has great support for folders; type c? to be presented with a list of known folders. You can scroll through the list or jump to an entry using its index (the number on the left). Press return when you've selected the right folder to be brought there.

Deleting

From the pager or index view, press 'd' to delete a message. It's that easy.

That's All, Folks

Mutt is really quite simple to use once you've got the basics down. Remember to use spacebar and backspace to scroll in the pager and the up and down arrows to move through the index. 'm' sends mail and 'r' replies.

The best thing about mutt is its nearly infinite customizability. Nearly everything described in this guide can be changed. Want to see who was CC'ed on a message? It's only an option away. The learning curve for mutt can seem high, but you should take a look at the mutt homepage for documentation and tips.

Mutt has excellent support for GPG, S/MIME, attachments, etc. Mutt also supports features like “multiple accounts” that webmail services likes GMail and Yahoo! Mail have been touting recently.

Oh, and 'q' quits mutt — not that you'd ever want to.

Useful Tricks

Use screen to speedup startup

screen is one of the most useful utilities ever; check out some documentation for more uses and information. A very simple, easy way to speed up mutt's startup time is to keep a session running in screen. To do so, start a new screen:

gilmanr@gridley:~$ screen

You'll be prompted to press return, do so. A new prompt will appear in front of you. Start mutt the usual way and enter your password. Now, press CTRL–A then CTRL–D to detach the screen; you'll be deposited back at your login prompt like this:

[detached]
gilmanr@gridley:~$

Now for the cool part. Log out of gridley and log back in. Now type screen -r to be presented with mutt ready to go! As long as gridley remains up, your session will persist. You can, of course, kill it by typing exit from within screen. You can tell that screen has been closed, as opposed to detached because you will see this message:

[screen is terminating]
gilmanr@gridley:~$