Cleaning Your Inbox with Mutt

Kyle Rankin — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 12:00:00 +0000

Teach Mutt yet another trick: how to filter messages in your Inbox with a simple macro.

I'm a longtime Mutt user and have written about it a number of times in Linux Journal. Although many people may think it's strange to be using a command-line-based email client in 2018, I find a keyboard-driven email client so much more efficient than clicking around in a web browser. Mutt is extremely customizable, which presents a steep learning curve at first, but now that I'm a few decades in, my Mutt configuration is pretty ideal and fits me like a tailored suit.

Of course, as with any powerful and configurable tool, every now and then I learn of a new Mutt feature that improves my quality of life dramatically. In this case, I was using an email system that didn't offer server-side filters. Because I was a member of many different email groups and aliases, this meant that my Inbox was flooded with emails of all kinds, and it became difficult to filter through all the unimportant email I wanted to archive with the emails that demanded my immediate attention.

There are many ways to solve this problem, some of which involve tools like offlineimap combined with filtering tools. With email clients like Thunderbird, you also can set up filters that automatically move email to other folders every time you sync. I wanted a similar system with Mutt, except I didn't want it to happen automatically. I wanted to be able to press a key first so I could confirm what was moving. In the process of figuring this out, I discovered a few gotchas I think other Mutt users will want to know about if they set up a similar system.

Tagging Emails

The traditional first step when setting up a keyboard macro to move email messages based on a pattern would be to use Mutt's tagging-by-pattern feature (by default, the T key) to tag all the messages in a folder that match a certain pattern. For instance, if all of your cron emails have "Cron Daemon" in the subject line, you would type the following key sequence to tag all of those messages:


TCron Daemon

That's the uppercase T, followed by the pattern I want to match in the subject line (Cron Daemon) and then the Enter key. If I type that while I'm in my Mutt index window that shows me all the emails in my Inbox, it will tag all of the messages that match that pattern, but it won't do anything with them yet. To act on all of those messages, I press the ; key (by default), followed by the action I want to perform. So to save all of the tagged email to my "cron" folder, I would type:

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Command-Line Cloud: rss2email

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 22 May 2014 17:05:39 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

In my last article, I started a series called Command-Line Cloud. The intent of the series is to discuss how to use the cloud services we are faced with these days without resorting to a Web browser. I spend most of my time on the command line, so that's where I'd most like to interface with cloud services. My last article described how to use Google Calendar from the command line, and in this article, I talk about a more general cloud service—RSS feeds. If I had written this column a few months ago, it would have been more focused on replacing Google Reader itself, because that was the primary RSS aggregator I used, but Google preemptively killed off the service and left a lot of users, including myself, scrambling to find a replacement. Although a number of people were able to find some sort of Web-based replacement, I realized the main features I wanted (sorting stories by date and vi key bindings to view the next story) were absent in a lot of the existing Google Reader replacements. What's worse, a lot of people were using this as an opportunity to make a quick buck by selling access to RSS services (and of course, still capturing everyone's valuable Web-viewing habits).

I decided to take a completely different tack and convert my RSS feeds to e-mail in a special mailbox and use an interface I already was used to: e-mail on the command line using mutt. I decided to use the rss2email program, written by the great Aaron Swartz, to manage my feeds. This software pulls down RSS feeds and converts each story into its own e-mail message that it sends to you. This means you can use whatever e-mail program you want to read your feeds, but of course, because we are focusing on the command line here, I am going to talk about only mutt.

Installation and Configuration

The rss2email program already had Debian packages, so on my system, installing it was as easy as typing apt-get install rss2email. If for some reason it isn't packaged for your distribution, follow the steps on https://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-with-rss2email to download and extract the rss2email tarball. This is Python software, so you will need Python 2.x on the system as well as some sort of local Sendmail program (Postfix or Exim works as well), or alternatively, you'll need to identify an outbound mail server you can use to send these e-mail messages.

Once rss2email is installed, you interface with it via the r2e command. To set up a new rss2email database containing your feeds, type:


$ r2e new youremail@yourdomain.net

Note that the e-mail address you use here will be the e-mail to which rss2email will send the e-mail messages. Once the database is set up, it's time to add feeds to it. You can do that with:

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