I've become sick and tired of Mail.app crashing and failing. Thunderbird doesn't do what I want, it feels bloated and slow. Entourage is a joke. For short while I used gmail, by forwarding everything to my gmail address, but I don't want to depend on a 3rd party like that.
So yesterday I made the leap back to mutt. For almost 2 years I used mutt exclusively and was very happy. Over time, server changes, software and OS changes I moved away and tried to find greener pastures. I've used everything from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Maill.app, Evolution, Thunderbird, Entourage and even Squirrelmail. None of them, however, compare to the simplicity and security that I have with mutt.
The setup that I have may seem complex to some, but it does exactly what I need. Nothing more, nothing less, right on target.
I use mutt as my mail application. I have a directory in my home dir called 'Mail' which stores all of my local mail. It also has subfolders for organization. I've decided to go with the maildir format instead of mbox, for a few reasons. Mainly locking and large file support (I get a lot of mail).
Mutt is not meant to be a mail fetcher or checker. It simple reads email. In order to actively check for email I use fetchmail, procmail and postfix. I run a minimalist installation of postfix on my local machine which acts as a storage agent. I have a cron that runs fetchmail every 15 minutes which moves mail from my different email accounts to my local account. Then as postfix recieves new mail for my local account it pipes it through procmail which sorts, categorizes, tags and filters all of my mail into my inbox and sub folders.
When I open up mutt I have all of my mail from the many different accounts already sorted, filtered and organized. It lets me spend less time dealing with email and spam and more time actually reading and responding.
Responding is easy as well. I use a program called esmtp to connect to the different smtp servers associated with different email accounts to send mail when I am online.
This setup is great for me. I can do all of my mail reading offline or online and all of my mail is archived locally under my control.
I've included the config files that I used to get this setup. Sooner or later I'll post a walk through guide explaining how to setup mutt, fetchmail, procmail and postfix on your os x machine.
{ 5 } Comments
I also used to have a very similar setup, but I've recently switched to Mail for a few reasons, one of them being the integration with the rest of the system.
Nevertheless, I still use fetchmail, postfix, procmail for mail fetching, and postfix for mail delivery (running as localhost). I store my mail in maildir format, and access it (in Mail) using the dovecot IMAP server.
I have found Mail's offline IMAP capabilities to be good enough to work for me, so my dovecot server runs on my main work machine, and I can access it both from my laptop (using a ssh tunnel) and from my desktop locally. Storing mail in maildir format lets me easily create backups and not be bound to Mail if I ever want to switch.
Need to check this out, GMail is driving me crazy! Very nice write up.
When I was using mutt (which I adored) I also set up spambayes, which required some doing because the Python installation on OS X didn't have everything spambayes needed.
For SMTP I used msmtp.
For my editor I went back and forth between vim and BBEdit -- both are cool, and I even had a codeless language module for BBEdit which fairly well aped a regular email editor.
It was a sweet, sweet setup, and I often wish I could go back to it.
If all you are using Postfix for is to receive mail, you can bypass Postfix all together and pipe mail directly to Procmail. Also, a good alternative to Fetchmail is Getmail by Charles Cazabon.
As for editors, when I last tested Mutt, I used SubEthaEdit as the editor. Worked pretty well.
Excellent post and inspiring too. I've been thinking about the exact same setup for a while but have been afraid to try ! Doesn't seem to difficult anymore. I can't find the config files you've posted though
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