Mutt setup

General

Mutt can be set up very flexible: Colors, key combinations, encryption etc. There are many examples on www.mutt.org.

A nice example configuration can be found in the file sample .muttrc. Features:

  • Unobtrusive color scheme
  • Integration of GNUPG for mail signing and encryption
  • Formatted printout of mails via "muttprint

Tips for setting up GNUPG can be found here.

Address book

On the server as well as on all Linux clients there is the Litte Brother's Database ~/.procmailrc which enters the following lines:

:0hc | /usr/bin/lbdb-fetchaddr

The query function is then activated for Mutt by the entry

set query_command="lbdbq %s"

in the ~/.muttrc file. The next time you start Mutt, you can simply press CTRL-T while typing a mail address to get a completion list.

If you add to the file ~/.lbdbrc the line

METHODS="m_inmail m_yppasswd m_gpg"

the collected addresses, the local user accounts and the own GPG key ring are used for the completion.

If you want to search already existing mailboxes for addresses, you can do this with

cat mailboxname | formail -s lbdb-fetchaddr

can be used. Afterwards you should use

/usr/local/lib/lbdb-munge

so that duplicate mail addresses are sorted out.

Further hints:

  • For Mutt to display German umlauts correctly, you should make sure that the file ~/.bashrc contains the line export LC_CTYPE=de_DE. It is best to log in again after the change.
  • With the line 
    keyserver wwwkeys.de.pgp.net
    in the file ~/.gnupg/options you can make GNUPG automatically download unknown keys from the keyserver and add them to your keyring. By the way, all programs that use GNUPG benefit from this: e.g. mutt, mozilla, kmail.