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mutt
Mutt is a small but very powerful text based program for reading electronic mail, including support for menus and scrolling, color terminals, MIME, POP, IMAP, and a threaded sorting mode.
General documentation for use of mutt:
You can put your personal mutt configuration in ~/.muttrc or ~/.mutt/muttrc. Using a dedicated directory allows putting related files, such as mailcap and aliases, in the same place.
Documentation in the man page is minimal, must use browser to view the manual. The location will vary between installations. It might be:
/usr/share/doc/mutt/html/manual.html
/usr/share/doc/mutt-1.4i/html/manual.html
/usr/local/doc/mutt/manual.txt
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Probliems with documentation:
The documentation refers to commands, but doesn't clearly say how how to run them when running mutt. Prefix commands with ":" when you enter while running mutt. This is not needed within coufiguration files such as muttrc.
Figuring out and remembering the single key aliases are bound to commands is difficult.
Details on configuration options might be available in the system muttrc that might be: /etc/Muttrc Samples might be available in
/usr/share/doc/mutt/examples/
/usr/share/doc/mutt-1.4i/samples/
/usr/local/doc/mutt/samples/
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Mutt automatically figures out the format of mailboxes it reads. You can specify the format of mailboxes you create using the "mbox_type" configuration variable. The supported mailbox formats are mbox, MMDF, MH and Maildir. The default is mbox.
How to do default bcc or cc of yourself.
Features:
Can attach files to mail you send. It is also handles and displays attachment to seceived mail.
Can read and write mail files compressed with bzip2 and gzip.
Highly customizable, but difficult to learn.
Usage problems seen:
When reading a mailbox, the Page Down key advances through a message and silently on to the next message when the end of the first is reached. The Page Up key scrolls up within a document, but doesn't go to the previous message when the top is received.
When viewing a message, the up and down arrow keys don't scroll up and down within that message, they switch to the previous and next message in the mailbox. The Home and End keys move to the top and bottom within a message.
How to:
Move when viewing a message with the pager:
Scroll to bottom/top of a message.
Scroll down/up half a page. The default is for no key to be assigned to these functions. The functions are half-down and half-up.
Scroll down/up a small number of lines. The default is Carriage Return to scroll down on line. The default is for no key to be assigned to scrooling up one line, the function is previous-line.
Scroll to a specific line number. Not available.
Move when viewing an index of messages:
Scroll to bottom/top. The default is = for top and * for bottom.
Scroll down/up half a page. The default is [ for up half a page and ] for down half a page.
Scroll down/up a small number of lines. The default is < for up one line and > for down one line.
Scroll to a specific line number. Just start entering the number to jump to.
To change the default key keys assigned to functions, use the "bind" command in your muttrc. For example:
bind pager ) half-down
bind pager ( half-up
bind index 'G' imap-fetch-mail
Transition from "mail" command:
Transition from "elm" command:
Configuration to access SLUUG servers: