Mutt and Imap

Yesterday I was having problems using the corporate webmail (yes, the one with three letters in the acronym), and lacked the chance to use a full-featured mail user agent.

So i remembered the old days :) when I used mutt and fetchmail to read my personal mail... and recalled mutt supported IMAP too. I started googling to find a tutorial and read a couple of nice pages (see below). In a pinch I was able to read imaps mailboxes in the console.
Here the very minimal stuff you need:

set mail_check=60
set timeout = 150
set spoolfile=imaps://$DOM\\$USERNAME@$IMAP_SERVER/INBOX
set folder=imaps://$DOM\\$USERNAME@$IMAP_SERVER/
set postponed="=Drafts"
set record="=Sent\ Items"
mailboxes =INBOX =INBOX/Folder1 =INBOX/Folder2 =Sent\ Items =Drafts
set header_cache="/home/$USER/tmp/mutt-cache"

Of course if you don't need to set a $DOM, you can skip it.

If you need more fancy colours, here is an extract I user from the original sample.muttrc:

#
# Color definitions
#
#
#color normal white default
color hdrdefault red default
color quoted brightblue default
color signature red default
color indicator brightyellow red
color error brightred default
color status yellow blue
color tree magenta default      # the thread tree in the index menu
color tilde magenta default
color message brightcyan default
color markers brightcyan default
color attachment brightmagenta default
color search default green      # how to hilite search patterns in the pager

color header brightred default ^(From|Subject):
color body magenta default "(ftp|http|https)://[^ ]+"   # point out URLs
color body magenta default [-a-z_0-9.]+@[-a-z_0-9.]+    # e-mail addresses
color underline brightgreen default

Here are the references I used to find IMAP information:

Mutt wiki: http://wiki.mutt.org/?MuttGuide/UseIMAP
Mutt documentation: http://mutt.sourceforge.net/imap/