I find that most GUI based clients tend to have issues with IMAP. Even the usually lightning fast kmail tends to have sluggish response times when dealing with remote mail folders. Same goes for Thunderbird and host of other mail clients that I tried. On the other hand Mutt performs awesome, and gives me exactly what I want: a lean IMAP client for a low traffic account.
How do you set up Mutt to work with imap? It is actually amazingly simple. You just need to add two lines to your .muttrc:
set folder="imaps://username@example.com"
set spoolfile="imaps://username@example.com/INBOX"
If you don’t feel like typing in your password every time you can also put it there:
set imap_pass="mypassword"
Also, my favorite line which disables that annoying Mutt prompt that asks if you want to move the read mail messages:
set mbox="!"
Maybe this will help someone who is looking for a good IMAP client. Mutt is really awesome in that area. Fast simple, and small. There even exists a working port for windows, but you are probably better off using the cygwin based version instead.
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[...] I previously covered Mutt several times, showing you how to set it up for IMAP and how to send out emails without full blown sendmail or exim setup just using basic SSMTP. There is also Pine which is a damn fine mail client too – if you can deal with editing your messages in pico. [...]
A far better, reliable and robust approach would be to use “OfflineIMAP” instead of the builtin IMAP-functionality of mutt.
Thanks for the tip. I had to change “imaps” to “imap” for it to work though.
Thanks
I was looking for the “set mbox=”!”" option
Glad I could help.
Thanks! This is awesome guide. I have used this many many times to configure mutt.
Actually this was the first post I saw on this blog