Mutt sent file

Community Bot 1. Stephen Kitt Stephen Kitt k 45 45 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. I was missing the full filename.

Thanks a bunch. This solved my issue. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Podcast Making Agile work for data science. Stack Gives Back It allows message threading. It provides us the facility of mailing lists. Supports at least 20 languages. If you liked this article, then do subscribe to email alerts for Linux tutorials.

If you have any questions or doubts? Related Posts. Can this work with two factor authentication enabled in google mail? Can we use this with Zimbra? Got something to say? Join the discussion. Cancel reply Have a question or suggestion? Comment Name Email Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The newest of the mailbox formats, used by the Qmail MTA a replacement for sendmail.

Similar to MH , except that it adds three subdirectories of the mailbox: tmp , new and cur. Filenames for the messages are chosen in such a way they are unique, even when two programs are writing the mailbox over NFS, which means that no file locking is needed and corruption is very unlikely.

Maildir maybe slower to open without caching in Mutt, it too is not very disk-space efficient depending on the environment. Since no additional files are used for metadata which is embedded in the message filenames and Maildir is locking-free, it's easy to sync across different machines using file-level synchronization tools. There are a number of built in shortcuts which refer to specific mailboxes.

These shortcuts can be used anywhere you are prompted for a file or mailbox path or in path-related configuration variables. Note that these only work at the beginning of a string.

No mailbox is opened when Mutt is invoked to send an email from the command-line. In interactive mode, Mutt reads the muttrc before opening the mailbox, so immediate expansion won't work as expected either. The folder-hook example above works because the command is executed later, when the folder-hook fires. Mutt has a few configuration options that make dealing with large amounts of mail easier. The first thing you must do is to let Mutt know what addresses you consider to be mailing lists technically this does not have to be a mailing list, but that is what it is most often used for , and what lists you are subscribed to.

This is accomplished through the use of the lists and subscribe commands in your. Now that Mutt knows what your mailing lists are, it can do several things, the first of which is the ability to show the name of a list through which you received a message i. This is useful to distinguish between personal and list mail in the same mailbox. Most people do not bother to remove the author of the message they reply to from the list, resulting in two or more copies being sent to that person.

Mutt also supports the Mail-Followup-To header. If any of the recipients are subscribed mailing lists, this header will contain all the recipients to whom you send this message, but not your address. If none of the recipients are subscribed mailing lists, the header will also contain your address, ensuring you receive a copy of replies. Using list-reply will in this case also make sure that the reply goes to the mailing list, even if it's not specified in the list of recipients in the Mail-Followup-To.

When header editing is enabled, you can create a Mail-Followup-To header manually. Mutt will only auto-generate this header if it doesn't exist when you send the message. While looking at an email message from a mailing list in the index or pager, you can interact with the list server in the ways defined by RFC , provided the email message specifies how to do so. Invoke the list menu bound to "ESC L" by default to see what options are available for a given message.

Common options are:. This works for tagged messages, too. Lastly, Mutt has the ability to sort the mailbox into threads. A thread is a group of messages which all relate to the same subject.

This is usually organized into a tree-like structure where a message and all of its replies are represented graphically. If you've ever used a threaded news client, this is the same concept. It makes dealing with large volume mailing lists easier because you can easily delete uninteresting threads and quickly find topics of value. Working within the confines of a console or terminal window, it is often useful to be able to modify certain information elements in a non-destructive way -- to change how they display, without changing the stored value of the information itself.

This is especially so of message subjects, which may often be polluted with extraneous metadata that either is reproduced elsewhere, or is of secondary interest. Any number of subjectrx commands may coexist. Utilities like biff or frm or any other program which accesses the mailbox might cause Mutt to never detect new mail for that mailbox if they do not properly reset the access time.

Other possible causes of Mutt not detecting new mail in these folders are backup tools updating access times or filesystems mounted without access time update support for Linux systems, see the relatime option. Contrary to older Mutt releases, it now maintains the new mail status of a folder by properly resetting the access time if the folder contains at least one message which is neither read, nor deleted, nor marked as old.

Mutt does not poll POP3 folders for new mail, it only periodically checks the currently opened folder if it's a POP3 folder. When set the default it will only notify you of new mail received since the last time you opened the mailbox. When unset, Mutt will notify you of any new mail in the mailbox. Pressing TAB will bring up a menu showing the files specified by the mailboxes command, and indicate which contain new messages. When the Inotify mechanism for monitoring of files is supported Linux only and not disabled at compilation time, Mutt immediately notifies about new mail for all folders configured via the mailboxes command excepting those specified with the -nopoll flag.

Dependent on mailbox format also added old mails are tracked not for Maildir. No configuration variables are available. Trace output is given when debugging is enabled via command line option -d3.

The lower level 2 only shows errors, the higher level 5 all including raw Inotify events. Getting events about new mail is limited to the capabilities of the underlying mechanism.

Inotify only reports local changes, i. Also the monitoring handles might fail in rare conditions, so you better don't completely rely on this feature. The sidebar can display these message counts. Mutt has the ability to dynamically restructure threads that are broken either by misconfigured software or bad behavior from some correspondents.

This allows to clean your mailboxes from these annoyances which make it hard to follow a discussion. This results in broken discussions because Mutt has not enough information to guess the correct threading.

The reply will then be connected to this parent message. To support DSN, there are two variables. You can print messages to the message window using the "echo" command. This might be useful after a macro finishes executing. This is a brief overview of the steps Mutt takes during message composition.

It also shows the order and timing of hook execution. Reply envelope settings. To, Cc, Subject, References header defaults. Prompts for To, Cc, Bcc, Subject headers. From header setting. Fcc setting. Compose menu. Note: send2-hook is evaluated each time the headers are changed. Note the variable documentation for caveats of Fcc'ing before sending. Note: prior to version 1. It is now by default saved afterwards, but if the saving fails, the user is prompted. In batch mode, Mutt performs less steps than interactive mode.

Encryption and Signing are not supported. Fcc'ing to an IMAP mailbox is not supported. Subject is not processed. Message body is copied from stdin. MuttLisp is a Lisp-like enhancement for the Mutt configuration file.

It is currently experimental, meaning new releases may change or break syntax. MuttLisp is not a real language, and is not meant to be an alternative to macros. The features are purposely minimal, with the actual work still being done by Mutt commands.

There are two ways to invoke MuttLisp: via the run command, or interpolated as a command argument. The run command evaluates the MuttLisp argument.

The output of the MuttLisp is then executed as a Mutt command, as if it were typed in the muttrc instead. The second way of running is directly as a command argument. An unquoted parenthesis expression will be evaluated, and the result substituted as the argument.

To avoid breaking existing configurations, this is disabled by default. Before doing so, you should review your Mutt configuration to ensure you don't have any bare parenthesis expressions elsewhere, such as the regexp parameter of a folder-hook. These can typically be surrounded by single or double-quotes to prevent being evaluated as MuttLisp. The result of the MuttLisp is directly assigned as the argument. It isn't reinterpreted, so there is no need for the outer quotes.

This is in contrast with the run command, where the output is reinterpreted by the muttrc parser. MuttLisp was inspired by Lisp, and so follows the same basic syntax. All statements are surrounded by parenthesis. The first argument inside the parenthesis is a function to invoke. The remaining arguments are passed as parameters. The arguments to functions are read and evaluated using muttrc syntax. This means Mutt variables or environment variables can be passed directly, or interpolated inside a double-quoted string.

Although the arguments to a function are evaluated, the result of the function call is not. MuttLisp has no types - everything is stored and evaluated as a string, just as with the muttrc. True is defined as a non-empty string, and false as the empty string. The muttrc is evaluated line by line, and MuttLisp is similarly constrained.

Input can be continued on more than one line by placing a backslash at the end of the line. Prevents interpretation of the list. Note that the list must still obey MuttLisp syntax: single quotes, double quotes, backticks, and parenthesis are still parsed prior to quote running and must be matching. Performs a case-sensitive comparison of each argument. Stops evaluating arguments when it finds the first one that is not equal. Returns "t" if they are all equal, and the empty string if not.

Accepts a single argument only. Returns "t" if the argument evaluates to the empty string. Otherwise returns the empty string. Returns the first argument that evaluates to the empty string. Otherwise returns the last argument, or "t" if there are no arguments. Returns the first argument that evaluates to a non-empty string. Requires 2 or 3 arguments. The first is a conditional. If it evaluates to "true" a non-empty string , the second argument is evaluated and returned.

Otherwise the third argument is evaluated and returned. It's important to remember that function arguments are evaluated, but the result is not. Also, the result of an interpolated command argument is used directly, and needs no quoting. The output of the run command is re-evaluated by the muttrc parser. So it's important to pay more attention to quoting issues when generating the command string below.

Because backticks are evaluated by MuttLisp too, we need to use the run command below and pay close attention to quoting. Mutt normalizes all e-mail addresses to the simplest form possible. If that isn't present either, Mutt takes the user's mailbox in the mailspool as determined at compile-time which may also reside in the home directory.

Highest priority has the mailbox given with the -f command line option. Every effort has been made to provide the functionality that the discerning MIME user requires, and the conformance to the standards wherever possible. One is the mime. The other is the mailcap file, which specifies the external commands to use for handling specific MIME types. Before the introduction of MIME, messages had a single text part and were limited to us-ascii header and content. With MIME, messages can have attachments and even attachments which itself have attachments and thus form a tree structure , nearly arbitrary characters can be used for sender names, recipients and subjects.

These are constructed using a major and minor type separated by a forward slash. These specify details about the content that follows. Based upon these, Mutt decides how to handle this part. Major types also exist for images, audio, video and of course general application data e. There's also the multipart major type which represents the root of a subtree of MIME parts. MIME also defines a set of encoding schemes for transporting MIME content over the network: 7bit , 8bit , quoted-printable , base64 and binary.

On reception, it can be flexibly configured as to how what MIME structure is displayed and if it's displayed : these decisions are based on the content's MIME type. When you select a message from the index and view it in the pager, Mutt decodes as much of a message as possible to a text representation. Where the Description is the description or filename given for the attachment, and the Encoding is one of the already mentioned content encodings.

The attachment menu displays a list of the attachments in a message. From the attachment menu, you can save, print, pipe, delete, and view attachments. You can also reply to the current message from this menu, and only the current attachment or the attachments tagged will be quoted in your reply.

You can view attachments as text, or view them using the mailcap viewer definition the mailcap mechanism is explained later in detail. See table Table 9. If no matching mailcap entries are found, the attachment will be displayed in the pager as raw text.

The compose menu is the menu you see before you send a message. It allows you to edit the recipient list, the subject, and other aspects of your message.

It also contains a list of the attachments of your message, including the main body. From this menu, you can print, copy, filter, pipe, edit, compose, review, and rename an attachment or a list of tagged attachments.

You can also modifying the attachment information, notably the type, encoding and description. The next field is the encoding for the attachment, which allows a binary message to be encoded for transmission on 7bit links. The next field is the size of the attachment, rounded to kilobytes or megabytes. To get most out of MIME, it's important that a MIME part's content type matches the content as closely as possible so that the recipient's client can automatically select the right viewer for the content.

However, there's no reliable way for Mutt to know how to detect every possible file type. Instead, it uses a simple plain text mapping file that specifies what file extension corresponds to what MIME type. This file is called mime. When you add an attachment to your mail message, Mutt searches your personal mime. Each line starts with the full MIME type, followed by a space and space-separated list of file extensions.

For example you could use:. A sample mime. If that command is not specified, Mutt will look at the file. Mutt recognizes all of these if the appropriate entry is found in the mime. Non-recognized mime types should only be used if the recipient of the message is likely to be expecting such attachments. Programs known to use this format include Firefox, lynx and metamail. In order to handle various MIME types that Mutt doesn't have built-in support for, it parses a series of external configuration files to find an external handler.

The default search string for these files is a colon delimited list containing the following files:. A definition line consists of a content type, a view command, and any number of optional fields. The view command is a Unix command for viewing the type specified. There are two different types of commands supported.

The default is to send the body of the MIME message to the command on stdin. In both cases, Mutt will turn over the terminal to the view program until the program quits, at which time Mutt will remove the temporary file if it exists. This means that mailcap does not work out of the box with programs which detach themselves from the terminal right after starting, like open on Mac OS X. In order to nevertheless use these programs with mailcap, you probably need custom shell scripts.

They will find the line which calls lynx, and run it. This causes lynx to continuously spawn itself to view the object. The interpretation of shell meta-characters embedded in MIME parameters can lead to security problems in general. Although Mutt's procedures to invoke programs with mailcap seem to be safe, there are other applications parsing mailcap, maybe taking less care of it.

Therefore you should pay attention to the following rules:. Don't quote them with single or double quotes. Mutt does this for you, the right way, as should any other program which interprets mailcap. Don't put them into backtick expansions. Be highly careful with evil statements, and avoid them if possible at all. Trying to fix broken behavior with quotes introduces new leaks — there is no alternative to correct quoting in the first place. Mutt recognizes the following optional fields:.

This flag tells Mutt that the command passes possibly large amounts of text on standard output. This causes Mutt to invoke a pager either the internal pager or the external pager defined by the pager variable on the output of the view command. Without this flag, Mutt assumes that the command is interactive. One could use this to replace the pipe to more in the lynx -dump example in the Basic section:.

Some programs make use of this environment variable automatically. Others provide a command line argument that can use this to set the output width:. Note that when using the built-in pager, only entries with this flag will be considered a handler for a MIME type — all other entries will be ignored. In all other situations it will not prompt you for a key. This flag specifies the command to use to create a new attachment of a specific MIME type. Mutt supports this from the compose menu. This command differs from the compose command in that Mutt will expect standard MIME headers on the data.

This can be used to specify parameters, filename, description, etc. This flag specifies the command to use to print a specific MIME type. Mutt supports this from the attachment and compose menus. This flag specifies the command to use to edit a specific MIME type. Mutt supports this from the compose menu, and also uses it to compose new attachments. Certain programs will require a certain file extension, for instance, to correctly view a file. This field specifies a command to run to test whether this mailcap entry should be used.

The command is defined with the command expansion rules defined in the next section. If the command returns 0, then the test passed, and Mutt uses this entry. If the command returns non-zero, then the test failed, and Mutt continues searching for the right entry.

Note that the content-type must match before Mutt performs the test. In this example, Mutt will run the program RunningX which will return 0 if the X Window manager is running, and non-zero if it isn't. When searching for an entry in the mailcap file, Mutt will search for the most useful entry for its purpose. In addition, you can then use the test feature to determine which viewer to use interactively depending on your environment.

For interactive viewing, Mutt will run the program RunningX to determine if it should use the first entry. If the program returns non-zero, Mutt will use the second entry for interactive viewing. Entries with the copiousoutput tag should always be specified as the last one per type.

For non-interactive use, the last entry will then actually be the first matching one with the tag set. For non-interactive use, only copiousoutput -tagged entries are considered. For interactive use, Mutt ignores this tag and treats all entries equally. The keywords Mutt expands are:. As seen in the basic mailcap section, this variable is expanded to a filename specified by the calling program.

Mutt will expand this to the value of the specified parameter from the Content-Type: line of the mail message. For instance, if your mail message contains:. The default metamail mailcap file uses this feature to test the charset to spawn an xterm using the right charset to view the message. The main purpose of these parameters is for multipart messages, which is handled internally by Mutt. In addition to explicitly telling Mutt to view an attachment with the MIME viewer defined in the mailcap file from the attachments menu, Mutt has support for automatically viewing MIME attachments while in the pager.

For this to work, you must define a viewer in the mailcap file which uses the copiousoutput option to denote that it is non-interactive. Usually, you also use the entry to convert the attachment to a text representation which you can view in the pager. For instance, if you set it to:. Mutt would try to find corresponding entries for rendering attachments of these types as text.

A corresponding mailcap could look like:. This can be used with message-hook to autoview messages based on size, etc. This is often used to send HTML messages which contain an alternative plain text representation. It consists of a number of MIME types in order, including support for implicit and explicit wildcards. The output from the filter script should be the generated mime type of the content, a blank line, and the content.

See Section 1. If you ever lose track of attachments in your mailboxes, Mutt's attachment-counting and -searching support might be for you. You can make your message index display the number of qualifying attachments in each message, or search for messages by attachment count.

You also can configure what kinds of attachments qualify for this feature with the attachments and unattachments commands. This can slow down operation especially for remote mail folders such as IMAP because all messages have to be downloaded first regardless whether the user really wants to view them or not though using Section 8. You can abbreviate this to I or A.

The first part of a message or multipart group, if inline, is counted separately than other inline parts. Specify root or R for disposition to count these as attachments. There are examples below of how this is useful.

The MIME types you give to the attachments directive are a kind of pattern. When you use the attachments directive, the patterns you specify are added to a list. When you use unattachments , the pattern is removed from the list. The patterns are not expanded and matched to specific MIME types at this time — they're just text in a list. They're only matched when actually evaluating a message.

Some examples might help to illustrate. The examples that are not commented out define the default configuration of the lists. Common usage would be:. Mutt supports several of optional features which can be enabled or disabled at compile-time by giving the configure script certain arguments.

Which features are enabled or disabled can later be determined from the output of mutt -v. The canonical syntax for specifying URLs in Mutt is an item enclosed in [] means it is optional and may be omitted :. A password can be given, too but is not recommended if the URL is specified in a configuration file on disk.

If you use this configuration, it is recommended to use a secure tunnel. If Mutt is compiled with POP3 support by running the configure script with the --enable-pop flag , it has the ability to work with mailboxes located on a remote POP3 server and fetch mail for local browsing. Remote POP3 servers can be accessed using URLs with the pop protocol for unencrypted and pops for encrypted communication, see Section 1. Polling for new mail is more expensive over POP3 than locally.

POP is read-only which doesn't allow for some features like editing messages or changing flags. However, using Section 8. Mutt applies some logic on top of remote messages but cannot change them so that modifications of flags are lost when messages are downloaded from the POP server either by Mutt or other tools.

After this point, Mutt runs exactly as if the mail had always been local. If you only need to fetch all messages to a local mailbox you should consider using a specialized program, such as fetchmail 1 , getmail 1 or similar. If Mutt was compiled with IMAP support by running the configure script with the --enable-imap flag , it has the ability to work with folders located on a remote IMAP server.

You can access the remote inbox by selecting the folder by its URL see Section 1. Alternatively, a pine-compatible notation is also supported, i. Mutt should correctly notice which separator is being used by the server and convert paths accordingly. When browsing folders on an IMAP server, you can toggle whether to look at only the folders you are subscribed to, or all folders with the toggle-subscribed command.

Polling for new mail on an IMAP server can cause noticeable delays. Reasonable values are:. Note that if you are using mbox as the mail store on UW servers prior to v As of version 1. This is mostly the same as the local file browser, with the following differences:. On Cyrus-like servers folders will often contain both messages and subfolders. For the case where an entry can contain both messages and subfolders, the selection key bound to enter by default will choose to descend into the subfolder view.

If you wish to view the messages in that folder, you must use view-file instead bound to space by default. It is the best option if you have it. This is overridden by an explicit username in the mailbox path i. If specified, this overrides Mutt's default attempt everything, in the order listed above. Besides supporting traditional mail delivery through a sendmail-compatible program, Mutt supports delivery through SMTP if it was configured and built with --enable-smtp.

For details on the URL syntax, please see Section 1. At least for Gmail, you can use the oauth2. Then, you'd use oauth2. The account-hook command may help. This hook works like folder-hook but is invoked whenever Mutt needs to access a remote mailbox including inside the folder browser , not just when you open the mailbox. This includes for example polling for new mail, storing Fcc messages and saving messages to a folder.

As a consequence, account-hook should only be used to set connection-related settings such as passwords or tunnel commands but not settings such as sender address or name because in general it should be considered unpredictable which account-hook was last used. In example Example 6. Header caching greatly speeds up opening large folders because for remote folders, headers usually only need to be downloaded once.

For Maildir and MH, reading the headers from a single file is much faster than looking at possibly thousands of single files since Maildir and MH use one file per message. Header caching can be enabled via the configure script and the --enable-hcache option. It's not turned on by default because external database libraries are required: one of tokyocabinet, kyotocabinet, lmdb, qdbm, gdbm or bdb must be present. If set to point to a file, one database file for all folders will be used which may result in lower performance , but one file per folder if it points to a directory.

In addition to caching message headers only, Mutt can also cache whole message bodies. There, Mutt will create a hierarchy of subdirectories named like the account and mailbox path the cache is for. All files can be removed as needed if the consumed disk space becomes an issue as Mutt will silently fetch missing items again. Pathnames are always stored in UTF-8 encoding. Mutt does not yet support maintenance features for header cache database files so that files have to be removed in case they grow too big.

It depends on the database library used for header caching whether disk space freed by removing messages is re-used. Cleaning means to remove messages from the cache which are no longer present in the mailbox which only happens when other mail clients or instances of Mutt using a different body cache location delete messages Mutt itself removes deleted messages from the cache when syncing a mailbox.

As cleaning can take a noticeable amount of time, it should not be set in general but only occasionally. The --enable-exact-address switch can be given to configure to build it with write-support for the latter syntax. You may also have compiled Mutt to co-operate with Mixmaster, an anonymous remailer. Mixmaster permits you to send your messages anonymously using a chain of remailers.

Mixmaster support in Mutt is for mixmaster version 2. To use it, you'll have to obey certain restrictions. Most important, you cannot use the Cc and Bcc headers. To tell Mutt to use mixmaster, you have to select a remailer chain, using the mix function on the compose menu. The chain selection screen is divided into two parts. In the larger upper part, you get a list of remailers you may use. In the lower part, you see the currently selected chain of remailers.

You can also delete entries from the chain, using the corresponding function. For details on the other capabilities, please have a look at the mixmaster documentation. Sidebar adds the following functions to Mutt.

By default, none of them are bound to keys. Color command. The Compressed Folder patch allows Mutt to read mailbox files that are compressed. But it isn't limited to compressed files. It works well with encrypted files, too. The patch adds three hooks to Mutt: open-hook , close-hook and append-hook. They define commands to: uncompress a file; compress a file; append messages to an already compressed file.

There are some examples of both compressed and encrypted files, later. For now, the documentation will just concentrate on compressed files. These placeholders should be placed inside single-quotes to prevent unintended shell expansions. If Mutt is unable to open a file, it then looks for open-hook that matches the filename. If your compression program doesn't have a well-defined extension, then you can use.

Mutt uses the command gzip -cd to create a temporary file that it can read. When Mutt has finished with a compressed mail folder, it will look for a matching close-hook to recompress the file. This hook is optional. If the folder has not been modified, the close-hook will not be called.

Mutt uses the command gzip -c to create a new compressed file. When Mutt wants to append an email to a compressed mail folder, it will look for a matching append-hook. Using the append-hook will save time, but Mutt won't be able to determine the type of the mail folder inside the compressed file.

Mutt also uses this type for temporary files. Mutt will only use the append-hook for existing files. The close-hook will be used for empty, or missing files.