is a
Text-based E-mail Client for
Unix-like systems. It was originally written by
Michael Elkins in
1995 and released under the
GNU General Public License . Initially it resembled
Elm , nowadays the program most similar to it may be the newsreader
Slrn .
Mutt supports most mail formats (notably both
Mbox and
Maildir ) and protocols (
POP3 ,
IMAP , etc). It also includes
MIME support, notably full
PGP /
GPG and S/MIME integration.
Mutt is a
Pure Mail User Agent (MUA) and cannot send e-mail in isolation. To do this, it needs to communicate with a
Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) using, for example, the common Unix
Sendmail interface. More recently,
SMTP support has been added.
It is rather configurable: it has hundreds of configuration directives and commands. It allows for changing all the key bindings and making
Keyboard Macro s for complex actions, as well as the colors and the layout of most of the interface. There are also many patches and extensions available that add functionality, such as
NNTP support or a sidebar.
Mutt is fully controlled with the keyboard, and has support for mail threading, meaning one can easily move around long discussions such as in
Mailing Lists . New messages are composed with an external
Text Editor by default, unlike
Pine which embeds its own editor known as
Pico (though you can configure pine to shell out to an external editor).
The mutt slogan is "''All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less''". The authors of mutt claim that while all e-mail clients are flawed, mutt has fewer flaws than any of the competition. The application of "''
Foo '' sucks less" has been observed making its way into mainstream hacker
Jargon as a form of compliment.
