Set up Mutt

General information

Mutt can be set up very flexibly: Colors, key combinations, encryption, etc. There are plenty of examples at www.mutt.org.

A nice sample 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 the Litte Brother's Database ~/.procmailrc contains 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 then simply press CTRL-T while entering a mail address to obtain a completion list.

If you also enter the following line in the ~/.lbdbrc file

METHODS="m_inmail m_yppasswd m_gpg"

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

If existing mailboxes are to be searched for addresses, this can be done with

cat mailboxname | formail -s lbdb-fetchaddr

to accomplish this. You should then use

/usr/local/lib/lbdb-munge

so that duplicate mail addresses are sorted out.

Further notes:

• In order for Mutt to display German umlauts correctly, you should ensure that the ~/.bashrc file 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 ~/.gnupg/options file, GNUPG will automatically download unknown keys from the named keyserver and add them to the keyring. Incidentally, all programs that use GNUPG benefit from this: e.g. mutt, mozilla, kmail.