Installing Mutt : plain text email client

First off, let’s find out what is Mutt.

Plain-text emails are — just plain text (captain obvious). They are the email equivalent to an old fashioned letter— no images, fancy fonts or any hyperlinks. They are not attractive, but they definitely come in handy.

That’s how you do it folks

While most of the HTML based emails have a chances of being marked as spam, a plaintext alternative are spam filter-friendly (quick marketing hack?).

There are quite a few benefits of using plaintext. Gmail, outlook, and most of the mail now a days are HTML based. But you can easily send a plain text mail though by changing the settings:

But most of us geeks prefer using a plain text email client like Mutt. So let’s get started with the installation. The following installation is for Ubuntu / Linux OS

Image soruce: Linuxandubuntu.com

Step 1: Open terminal
press ctrl+alt+T to open terminal (or in whatever way you want to)

Step 2: Installing Mutt
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install mutt

Step 3: Configure Mutt
We need to configure mutt to read / send emails from your email id and set up directories for cache and certificates.
Let’s start with creating them:
$ mkdir -p ~/.mutt/cache/headers
$ mkdir ~/.mutt/cache/bodies
$ touch ~/.mutt/certificates
$ touch ~/.mutt/muttrc

Now let’s work on the configuration file
vim ~/.mutt/muttrc
you can use gedit / atom or any other editor to open the file (but vim always comes in handy and you should definitely install it if you don't have it already)

Add the following lines in the muttrc file:

set from = “nidhiraniyer@gmail.com”
set realname = “Nidhi Raniyer”
set imap_user = “nidhiraniyer@gmail.com”
set imap_pass = “Gmailmymail”

set editor = “vim”

Raniyer”
set imap_user = “nidhiraniyer@gmail.com”
set imap_pass = “Gmailmymail”

<h1>set smtp_authenticators = “login” </h1>
set ssl_starttls = yes
set ssl_force_tls = yes

set folder = “imaps://imap.gmail.com:993”
set spoolfile = “+INBOX”
set trash = “+[Google Mail]/Trash”

set smtp_url = “smtps://nidhiraniyer@gmail.com@smtp.gmail.com:465/”
set smtp_pass = “Gmailmymail”

set header_cache =~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir = ~/.mutt/cacher/bodies
set certificate_file = ~/mutt/certificates

set move = no
set imap_keepalive = 900

set sort = reverse-threads

set editor = “vim”