Mutt Tools

A collection of useful tools which I use in conjunction with my Mutt setup.

mutt_profile

Since I use multiple Mutt instances for my different mail accounts, I created a script which manages the configuration file hell for me. In addition to the different accounts, I also start mutt in different modes. So for example for normal reading or composing of mails. Accordingly, I have a relatively complex directory structure to configure my Mutt, which looks as follows:

mutt
 |-> config
 |-> profiles
 |    |->     profile1
 |    |->     profile2
 |-> accounts
 |    |->     account1
 |    |        |-> general
 |    |        |-> mailboxes
 |    |->     account2
 |    |        |-> general
 |    |        |-> mailboxes
 |    |        |-> maillinglists
 |-> common
 |    |->     general
 |    |->     colors
 |    |->     keybindings
 |-> foldertypes
      |->     default
      |->     normal
      |->     mailinglists

The files in the profile directory contain the mode depending settings and load additional files from the common directory. The files in the account directories contain the corresponding settings for the account such as mail address, signature, and headers. The config file in the base directory sets up the directories and then loads the mode and account settings. In the foldertypes directory one can define various settings for special types of folders (e.g. mailinglists) which can then be loaded via folder-hooks.

The mutt_profile script adapts the main configuration file and then starts Mutt with the correct settings.

mutt_compose

I use this script to create additional terminal windows running their own mutt instance to be able to write my mails in a different terminal than where I read my mails. The script uses mutt_profile to spawn a new Mutt instance in the compose mode.

mutt_view

This script is a small starter script which can be used to execute viewers for attachments detached from the actual Mutt instance. The script will copy the file and then run the viewer program in the background so that Mutt can be used as if nothing happened.

mutt_send

This script will act as a proxy between Mutt in the compose profile and the actual sendmail binary. The purpose of this script is to handle various auxiliary tasks such as marking a mail as replied-to, logging and other similar things.

mutt_addresses

This script is intended to work as an address book for mutt. It can query the notmuch mail indexing tool to retrieve mail addresses with the given search string. Hence, this script can be used as a drop-in replacement for mutt's 'query_command' setting and thus replace tools such as abook.

mailboxsplit

I wrote this script to be able to extract all mailboxes belonging to one account from the mailboxes file created by offlineimap. The script extracts the mailboxes and performs some simple renaming so that Mutt properly understands them.

mailboxwatcher

This script continuously monitors the mailboxes file generated by offlineimap and adapts the account mailboxes files accordingly so that they are always up to date.

mailmanage

mailmanage is a script which can automatically remove mails from a maildir which are older than a specified number of days. I use this script to keep my maildirs which contain mails from mailing lists small so that Mutt can open them as fast as possible.

The script uses mmanage, a python tool designed to perform archiving or cleaning operations on maildirs.

l3nkz / mutt-tools