November 27th, 2019

Abstract

Hello there! This is an article on advanced neomutt features that might have been missed in my previous article on (neo)mutt. This page has been inspired by some of the issues I had with neomutt and the fantastic neomutt community.

Named Mailboxes

With release 20191102, neomutt team has introduced named-mailboxes features, which allows you to name your mailboxes (duh) in the sidebar. It can be used for some pretty creative things, like setting a mailbox different to what you have in your `.mail` directory, change the language, or make delimeters. For example, here is an excerpt from one of my neomutt accounts that is tied to my KU mail account

set folder="~/.mail/kumail"
set spoolfile = +'INBOX'

set trash = +'Deleted Items'
set postponed = +'Drafts'
set record = +'Sent Items'
named-mailboxes "  ―――――― ♠ KU ――――――  " =Journal
named-mailboxes "↓ Inbox" =INBOX
named-mailboxes "↑ Sent" ='Sent Items'
named-mailboxes "∇ Trash" ='Deleted Items'
named-mailboxes "∗ Junk" ='Junk Email'
named-mailboxes "∃ Drafts" ='Drafts'

After launching neomutt, it gives me nice custom sidebar with a dope delimeter

 ―――――― ♠ KU ――――――    │ 1 |   [11-27-19 12:03:35] Mom       Did you buy eggs?
↓ Inbox [32]      3568 │ 2 |   [11-27-19 09:07:01] Bill      All rights reserved.
↑ Sent             797 │ 3 |   [11-27-19 06:07:02] Lao Tse   Difficult Paths
∇ Trash            359 │ 4 |   [11-27-19 06:59:18] Mando     This is the way
∗ Junk               4 │ 5 |   [11-26-19 22:59:02] BlondiXXX How much does she love you?
∃ Drafts               │ 6 |   ...

named-mailboxes also work with multiple accounts. You can use some garbage mailboxes (looking at you, Journal) as delimeters.

Threads

I have been looking around how to do threads and I finally found out how. Usually, mutt just gives you your mail all in one blob of a list. With threads, you can have beautiful trees of replies, threads, forwards, and more! To trigger that, just add this to your `.muttrc`

set sort = 'reverse-threads'
set sort_aux = 'last-date-received'

This is how it looks with huge mail chains

Fortune mailchain with threads enabled

For ease of use, you can add the following line to bind your `c` key to collapse threads ◼︎

macro index c <collapse-thread> "collapse-thread"

Faster, better, stronger 🐩

Abstract

Named Mailboxes

Threads