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Using mutt on OS X

The other day I put up a full-feature tutorial on how to use mutt on OS X (most of it is applicable to any other OS, of course… there are very few bits that are OS X specific). Thanks to a hint on macosxhints.com, this article is becoming one of the most popular on the site, with over 1900 views in 5 days. Not too shabby.

I’ll probably update it a bit in the next few days to include info on using imap with mutt (without using fetchmail, which is what I normally do).

7 Comments
Mar 9, 2007
By vdanen OS X

7 Comments

  1. cuetip

    I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it seems like the sidebar doesn’t refresh unread counts until you open the mailbox… which means i have to go through each of my mailboxes and open them in sequence to see if there’s new messages =(

    am i missing something, or is this just the way mutt is? besides that, your guide was pretty much perfect in helping me get set up, so thanks!

    Mar 11, 2007 @ 21:27:05

  2. Vincent Danen

    No, it’s not just you. I’ve got the same problem as well, and find it rather frustrating. It’s a limitation of the patch I suspect.

    Normally, I just sync the folder (“y” with my keybindings) and then change to the next mailbox. If you sync the mailbox, then it updates properly (although it syncs before the change, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t update properly).

    Mar 11, 2007 @ 23:23:21

  3. cuetip

    A cursory look at the source tells me that it might be relatively easy to change the sidebar behavior (perhaps by having draw_sidebar() check the status of each mailbox) but I don’t know if I’d be able to do it.

    I agree, this is pretty frustrating.

    Mar 12, 2007 @ 11:24:26

  4. Jim Gottlieb

    Any ideas on getting mutt to work on OS X when the home directories are AFP mounted from an Xserve?

    mutt complains that its attempts to do fcntl locking are “not supported”. I tried rebuilding with –disable-fcntl (which I figured would make it use only dot-locking), but trying to use that version brings up lots of “lock count exceeded” messages.

    Apr 25, 2007 @ 15:48:05

  5. Vincent Danen

    No idea. I’ve never tried it over AFP… are you able to use NFS or SMB? Either one might work better (I’ve never really done much with AFP).

    Apr 26, 2007 @ 17:20:35

  6. Sy

    Having trouble following your instructions on 10.6.

    When trying to configure I get an error:-

    checking build system type… configure: error: /bin/sh ./config.sub –enable-pop3 failed
    configure: WARNING: cache variable ac_cv_build contains a newline

    Then with make:-
    make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.

    Any ideas with 10.6, do you stil run mutt in mac os x

    Aug 18, 2010 @ 04:24:44

  7. vdanen

    Do you have XCode installed? I’m not currently using mutt on OS X anymore, but I just successfully ran configure:

    
% ./configure --prefix=/sw --with-curses --with-regex \
--enable-locales-fix --enable-pop --mandir=/sw/share/man
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /sw/bin/ginstall -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
...
config.status: creating po/POTFILES
config.status: creating po/Makefile

    I did have some issues when I had SASL support included in the configure line due to missing -lsasl2 but I was too lazy right now to figure it out (missing a package). This was also with mutt 1.5.19; I’ve not tried the latest version yet.

    Be sure you have XCode installed, it won’t work without that.

    Aug 18, 2010 @ 07:08:08

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