Using IMAP with Mutt

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.

[tags]mail, email, mutt, imap, client[/tags]