hpr_transcripts/hpr1727.txt

Episode: 1727
Title: HPR1727: Basic Mutt
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1727/hpr1727.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:18:38

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This is HPR episode 1,727 entitled Basic Mut.
It is hosted by Frank Bell and is about 32 minutes long.
The summary is Frank Bell discusses setting up and using mut as an male client.
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Hello, this is Frank Bell.
I've been away for a while, some circumstances happen that made it a little more difficult
for me to record, but mostly I ran out of ideas where I thought I could make a contribution.
However, I'm back and I have a couple of ideas.
My summer project this summer was to learn how to use mut.
I had two reasons for this.
I wanted to learn more about how email works under the hood.
I had a very accomplished member of a local hosting firm tell me once that in his opinion,
handling email is the single most complicated thing on the internet and he had a flowchart
to prove it.
And I wanted to learn more about how to use the VIM editor.
I've struggled long for years being able to use VIM or buy to do things like editmyrc.local
file or edit my etc.stab file with knowing just a few of the commands, but I never really
felt comfortable with it.
And I realized I'm not a coder, so I'm not writing code and stuff like that in a text
editor all day.
I realized that if I were going to get better at using VIM or VIM and between the two I would
certainly recommend use VIM, which stands for VIM improved.
I had to put myself into a situation where I would use it regularly and I realized that
using it to write and respond to emails was just such a situation.
And most command line email programs do not have built in editors.
It uses an external editor and I said, aha, if I use MUT, I can force myself to learn
more about VIM and get comfortable in it.
I chose MUT after extensive research into alternatives such as pine and alpine, the
VINNERBLE MAIL program after an intensive three or four minutes of Googling about.
I want to say at the outset, I am not a MUT expert.
I'm at best, a fairly accomplished somewhere between beginner and intermediate user.
I still use a GUI email client on my primary computer, currently CMUNK email, but I've also
used over the years opera, Sylphide, and I've tried other Linux email clients such as
K-mail and evolution which deserves to have been put out of this misery a long time ago.
I'm going to address just basic stuff here.
If you are in a complex Linux or Unix postmaster, there is nothing that I can tell you.
Go off and record your own podcast for hacker public review.
Also, I'm talking about setting up the email for an individual user.
So all my configuration files will go into my home directory.
I'm not doing anything in forward slash Etsy.
And finally, I'm not talking about doing my own mail server.
I'm talking about using various Linux Unix programs to send and receive mail to and from
my ISP and other internet email providers.
For one reason, I don't think I'm hardly ready to try to set up my own mail server.
I look at the configuration guides for things like XM, SIN mail, and PostFix and my brain
gets numb.
For another reason, my ISP bans public facing servers for home, internet accounts, and
they enforce this policy aggressively, and I don't need that kind of trouble.
Now in order to use MUT to read and write emails, I need other programs.
To go to the three letter acronyms that have been around for years and years and years,
I need an MTA or MTAs mail transport agent to send and receive the mail.
An MTA or mail delivery agent to take the incoming email and put it into mailboxes and
an MUA mail user agent, and that would be the program for reading and writing emails
in my case MUT.
After looking at a number of tutorials, I found a couple which will be linked in the
show notes that seemed to me the best of the lot for a beginner such as me.
So I used the programs that they used and pretty much copied their guidelines for the configuration.
I used fetch mail to get the mail, proc mail, and form mail to process the mail.
My understanding is that proc mail processes the mail, and form mail actually puts it
in the mailboxes that the two programs work together.
MUT as I mentioned is a mail reader and a little program called MSMTP to send the mail.
To set this up, I had to create RC files for fetch mail, proc mail, MUT, and MSMTP.
When I say create RC files, I mean copy RC files from the tutorials and then tweak them
to my text.
Here is a meta view.
I am not going to go into the syntax of the RC files.
There are man pages for each of them, excellent tutorials where you can look at the syntax
and my experience as a podcast listener is that listening to people parse code in audio
is not really a very good way to learn.
Just as an aside, I understand that RC stands for run time configuration.
Time the file, the program is run, it looks at the RC file and says, okay, these are my
marching orders.
I will go do that.
If you change the RC file, you have to stop and rerun the program for the changes to
take effect.
I would also note in the outset that there are two primary mailbox formats in the next
world.
There is the older up to the inbox format in which the mail is stored in a honking grade
spool file and when you look at a particular email, you are looking at one piece of that
spool file.
Traditionally that spool file is in forward slash bar, forward slash spool, forward slash
mail, forward slash username, though you can place it elsewhere if you wish.
And then there is the mail der, M-A-I-L-D-I-R for mail directory format in which each individual
email is its own little file inside of a mail box.
I experimented with both.
Even in my limited experience, both of them have some pluses and minuses.
If you want to have a mind to start this, I suggest you start with the inbox format simply
because it is a little simpler.
Also note that in configuring the MUT RSC and the PROC mail RSC, which I will be talking
about shortly, there are slight differences depending on which mailbox format you use.
You have to tell these programs where the various mailboxes are located and the syntax
of the names of the mailboxes will be slightly different based on the format.
Okay.
Mail, fetch mail is a program to get mail, hence the name.
It is very simple to configure.
You need to open up your text editor and create a fetch mail RSC.
Here is the syntax.
The word poll, P-O-L-L, space, the mailbox, pop.somewhere.com, imapp.somewhere.com.
You would get that information from your email provider, space, the word protocol, space,
and whether it is pop 3 or imapp, user, space, quotation marks, user log on name for that
mail server, closed quotation marks, space, password, quotation marks, password for that
mail server, closed quotation marks.
That is the basic minimal format you would need.
If you are using a non-standard port, you have to specify the port number.
If you are using TLS or SSL, you need to specify that in this file.
The tutorial will show you how to do that.
It is really very straightforward.
If you have multiple accounts, you can configure your fetch mail to fetch mail from all those
accounts, simply by adding a new line for each account.
For my experimentation, I have one for my ISP email account and a line for Gmail.
You can run fetch mail in several ways.
Of course, once you get everything working, you want it automated.
You can run it as a daemon.
You can run it as a cron job.
When you are setting things up, you can run it from the command line, which is very
useful for testing.
You can create macros.
You can create a macro to hit the right combination of keys and run fetch mail from within
the money interface.
In my case, I chose to run it from the decrelem system monitor, which I quite like.
I used it since very early on in my experience with Linux.
I like its compactness.
I like its skinability.
I like its versatility.
In decrelem, you would open the configuration screen, go to built-ins, go to mail, and there
you would find the place to enter the fetch mail command to go pick up your mail and set
the interval.
How often do you want it to run?
I usually set it.
On my primary computers, I'll pick up the mail every 5 or 10 minutes.
On secondary computers, I might do it only every half hour.
Very straightforward.
Fetch mail then passes the name to prop mail.
You need a dot prop mail rsc file to tell prop mail how to behave.
At the top of the prop mail rsc file, you specify the mail directory format.
The mode of logging in the location of the log files and some other housekeeping details
and the location of form mail.
Then it gets interesting.
The rest of the prop mail file, you can use for sorting the mail and you use what prop mail
calls recipes.
They are actually an implementation of regular expressions.
That mail has, according to the man page, an internal implementation of eGrap.
If your brain glazes over at using regular expressions as mine does, this is a good way
to get an early taste of understanding and using regents.
I'm not going to go into the details of the recipes, but I will give you an example
of how I use them.
I have a mail box for HPR and in prop mail I tell it to take all the mail from the HPR
mailing list and put it in this mail box.
If you have a Facebook account, you can have a mail box for messages coming from facebook
mail.com and facebook.com.
You can have prop mail with all the Facebook messages into that mail box where you can
delete them unread with minimum of inconvenience.
I have two links in the show notes about how to use prop mail.
Both of them are old blanks because prop mail is an old.
I would say mature program.
It works so they don't need to come out with a new version of it every two years.
The best one is the one from the umbc.edu website that's University of Maryland.
Baltimore County, the fellow who wrote it is no longer at UMBC.
He has moved on to do other stuff.
But when you read it, you can tell that he clearly knows how to teach.
It's easily the most understandable introduction to prop mail and regents that I have found
in these several months.
I have been working on understanding and improving my usage of mutt and the related programs.
So prop mail gets the mail, it sorts it according to the recipes that you give it, hands it
the form mail and form mail puts it in the mailbox.
You do not need a form mail RSC file, prop mail deals with form mail.
Now to send the mail, I mentioned I got a little program called MSMTP.
The syntax for that is also very straightforward, as straightforward as for fetch mail.
For a particular account, you would have the word account followed by the name of the
account.
So it might be account, space, Gmail.
That's simply a label for convenience.
Then you specify the host, host, space, the outgoing email server, smtp.sumware.com, smtp.sumware.net.
From space, email address, user space, your user name, and you don't have to use quotation
marks in this configuration, your password, space, and then your password, and again you
do not need quotation marks.
And then other stuff you may have to enter if your smtp server uses non-standard ports
you need to enter the ports.
You're using TLS or SSL to send mail.
You need to enter the information for a TLS or SSL and that will depend on how your recipient
wants to see that information.
Now here's something that I noticed.
When I was first experimenting with this, back in the summer, I could not get MSMTP to send
mail to my local ISP that I was connected to.
When I remarked out by my user name and password, I was able to send email via my local ISP's
smtp server.
I asked an accomplished Linux citizen man why this was and he just said Frank, he said they
know who you are, just like I know who my users are.
However, were I to try to connect to my local ISP from say Philadelphia, I would need
to make that the user name and password active again to establish a connection from a different
ISP.
I just found that rather interesting and kind of twisty because one would expect they
would just disregard it if they knew who you were but no, it's through a password error.
Now we've got, we're getting the mail, we're putting mail in mailboxes, we're able to
send mail, now it's time to look at month.
The other RSC files I've talked about have been fairly simple.
The MUT RSC file is a beast.
Not that it's necessarily complex unless you get into macros and stuff, but it's big.
It does a lot of stuff, mine is 140 lines long.
Now that does count empty lines and about 40 of those lines are configuration for the
colors.
In other words, what the interface looks like on the screen, background color, foreground
color, so on and so forth.
The MUT RSC file tells MUT your email identity, the location and format of your inbox or
inboxes, where you want to save drafts, what MUT calls postponed mail, what editor you
want to use to edit the emails or compose emails.
If you don't specify an editor, it will default to whatever the system default editor is.
So in Slackware, it defaults to Vi, because Vi is the system default in Slackware.
In Magia, it defaults to VIM, because VIM is the system default in Magia.
And the Vi command in Magia is actually alias to VIM, so when you type in VI, VIM starts.
So on Magia, I don't have to specify an editor to get VIM, and remember VIM was one of my
reasons for doing this in the first place.
On Slackware, I do have to specify the VIM editor, otherwise I get Vi.
You specify the program for sending the mail, the locations of your address, book, and signature,
interface behavior, macros, time date display, and the like, and the colors.
What I did was I started with the MUT RSC file from CalMAR, linked in the show notes.
That is Charlie, Alpha, Lima, Mike, Alpha, Romeo, Dot, Whiskey, Sierra, forward slash, Mike,
uniform, time go, time go.
And then I set about tailoring it and tweaking it to meet my taste and do some of the things
I picked up on some of the other tutorials, in particular, setting up macros so I could
send either from my ISP email account or from my Gmail account.
A couple of things about using MUT actually more than a couple.
In the primary interface, each email will appear as a line, and you're looking at your
inbox, you'll see a line that shows the number of the email, some various indicators such
as in, meaning a new email, or meaning when you reply to, and so on, but I generally
don't pay much attention to those, the date, the sender, and the subject.
You can open the email by hitting the space bar or pressing the inner key, navigating
it by using the space bar to move down the minus sign to move up.
There is no side bar.
There is a package referred to as a patch that you can compile into MUT and they create
a side bar.
I have not played with that at all.
In the default inbox view, the emails are descending from oldest to newest and they are
threaded, meaning that a reply to one email will be shown in the expanded view as underneath
the email it's replying to.
It will not be a separate shown separately at the bottom of the inbox.
You can change those preferences in the MUT RC.
There is also a context menu for whatever view you're in, whether it's viewing an email,
looking at the inbox, the send dialog, that will show the most commonly used commands
in that view, as well as a question mark, you hit enter question mark and it will open
a text health file which you navigate with the space bar and the minus sign.
If you want an address book that you can access through tab completion when you're typing
in the email address for a new email, you will need an alias file.
You can create that file by using the touch command, you can put it wherever you want,
that you need to tell MUT where it is in the MUT RC.
Then you can add someone's email address to the alias file from the MUT interface.
You can also add that manually in any text editor.
If you want a signature file, you put that in a separate signature file, these are commonly
hidden files but they don't have to be and tell MUT where that signature file is and
then it will automatically append the signature to your email before you send it.
The body of an email is technically an attachment to the headers.
To view the body in line so you open up the email and you're looking at the sender's name,
the address, the subject, the list of whether or not there are any attachments and then
you see the text of the email in the MUT RC, you set the all of you setting to text slash
HTML.
You will see many of the examples of this in the tutorials.
Now HTML email, have you ever heard anyone say HTML email is evil?
View it in a text email client and you will understand why they say that.
A single HTML message may appear to be 10 in the inbox, may appear to be 10, 15, 20,
25, 30, 40 threads and if you place the selection key over any of those individual items, you
will then hit in there and you will see the same darn email.
You will also, unless you do something to prevent it, see the raw HTML is like viewing
source on a web page.
In order to view the HTML in an HTML format, you need to get a text browser and tell MUT
to use that text browser to format the email.
These browsers include L-Y-N-X, L-I-N-K-S graphic, E-Links, E-L-I-N-K-S, W-3-M to name
several of the ones that I have used.
I tend to prefer either links L-I-N-K-S or W-3-M, but they all work quite nicely and the
way you tell MUT to use your text browser is through a file called the .mailcat file.
Mailcat stands for Metamail Capabilities, not as I initially thought mail capture.
MUT does not need to be told to look for the mailcat file, it knows to look for the mailcat
file.
It's part of a larger package called Metamail.
I gather from my reading the other text email clients know to look for.
They give you a sample line from the .mailcat file, from my mailcat text-forward slash HTML,
semicolon.
So it says if it's a text HTML package, then spaces links L-I-N-K-S and that refers to
the links browser space, percent S, semicolon, name template, equal percent S, HTML.
So if this is an HTML email, look at it with the links browser.
There is another format, there is a slightly different line in there, again I'm not going
to parse that line, but you get the idea.
If you were using W3M, it would say text-forward slash HTML, semicolon space, W3M, and then
the rest of the line.
In the mailcat, you can also specify handlers for other types of files, such as PDFs,
I commonly open PDFs in Ocula, images, and you specify image handler, such as F-E-H.
I've used X-V on one of my machines, word processor files, O-D-T-Doc, you can specify
LibreOffice or whatever your word processing program is.
And once you get used to it, it's very nice and clean.
Now opening links in HTML email, you need something else, you need URL view, and that
is in fact a program commonly resides in USR bin, and you need a dot URL view to tell
URL view how to behave.
Now here's the sole line in my URL view file, all caps command, space, name of the browser,
you see monkey, I use conqueror, the name of the browser, space, percentage, percent
sign, S, and with that enabled, in my, I have a macro, which I shamelessly copy from
Kalwar, I hit control B, and it open up a page that displays all the links in the email.
Now here's where it gets interesting, it doesn't just show the links that the person
who wrote the email wants you to know about it, it shows all the other links, all the
tracking links, all the report, whether or not this email was open links, all the
all that good, everything on one of them.
I have found sometimes when you hit the links in some of the user alerts I get, they don't
necessarily open properly, I don't know, and I have it dug down sometimes is because
the link is repeated, and there's a malformed link, and then there's a proper link.
So, but that's what you need to look at the links, but it really is interesting to look
at an email, which in a GUI email client might have two or three visible links, and you
open it up using URL view, and you see there are 15 links in there.
Another thing I've noted is that the mailboxes must be listed in the MUT RC file.
If they exist on the hard drive, but they're not listed in the MUT RC file, you will not
be able to easily change from one mailbox to the other using the C for change mailbox
command.
They also must be listed properly depending on whether you're using MIMBOX or a mail door
formats.
So, that's a little bit of an introduction to using MUT for your email.
If you haven't used a text email client, I would say give it a shot, it's an awful lot
of fun making it work, and I think a lot of us who do this sort of stuff, enjoy making
stuff work, you also learn an awful lot about how Linux and the internet works, and I
will say going back to one of my motivations, I feel I'm a lot more comfortable using
them than I was before I started doing this.
I do not find them at all, intimidating anymore, I'm still only a beginner, but I'm a comfortable
beginner.
Thank you very much.
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