Mutt
From DreamHost
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Mutt 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. Mutt supports most mail formats (notably both mbox and Maildir) and protocols (POP3, IMAP, NNTP etc). It also includes MIME support, notably full PGP/GPG integration. It is highly configurable: it has hundreds of configuration directives and commands. It allows for changing all the key bindings and making keyboard macros for complex actions, as well as the colors and the layout of most of the interface. Mutt is also fully controlable 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).
Mutt can work via POP3 or IMAP, and this is the only way newer mail-only users can access their mail. DreamHost recommends older shell+mail accounts use Mutt to access their mail directly via local Maildir files, as Mutt natively supports Maildir.
You may wish to compile your own version of Mutt in your home directory, if you'd like a newer version, or if you'd like to apply some of the many patches available (DreamHost uses the Debian version, which has a lot of common patches applied by default... the security fixes have also been backported, so the current version DreamHost is running should be safe against all known exploits).
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Configuring Mutt For DreamHost Email Accounts
If you have an old-style combination shell+mail account, you may use Mutt to access your mail spool directly. Configuration for this scenario is outside the scope of this document.
Newer mail-only users can only access their mail via IMAP (which Webmail uses) or POP3.
POP3
Put information here.
IMAP
In your Mutt configuration file you need to specify the location of your inbox and other folders. These two settings are controlled, respectively, by the spoolfile and folder options. Your inbox is simply INBOX. You tell Mutt this by adding the following line to your Mutt configuration file:
set spoolfile="imaps://mail.example.com/INBOX"
Replace example.com with the name of your domain.
DreamHost only allows users to create subfolders of their INBOX. Folders outside of the INBOX are not allowed. This means any new folders are created as INBOX.newfolder, INBOX.anotherfolder, and INBOX.newfolder.subnewfolder. All your folders will be in INBOX.something. You need to convey this to Mutt by setting the folder option:
set folder="imaps://mail.example.com/INBOX."
Replace example.com with the name of your domain.
You can now move, save, and copy messages by specifying folder names in the usual way: =Drafts, =Sent, etc.
SSL
It is highly recommended that you use SSL. To do this, Mutt must have a place to save SSL certificates. Where you save these certificates doesn't really matter, but you have to put them somewhere. One possibility is:
set certificate_file="~/.muttcerts"
SSLv2 is insecure, so you should not use it if you can avoid it. SSLv3 and TLS are both secure. You can tell Mutt to use ssl for receiving mail with these options:
set ssl_use_sslv2=no set ssl_use_sslv3=yes set ssl_use_tlsv1=yes set imap_force_ssl=yes
... and for sending mail (if the sending server supports it) via:
set ssl_starttls=yes
