It occurred to me that Mats wrote in gmane.os.netbsd.help:
> Hello
> I'm using mutt and I want to use the nice future with ascii-colors, and I
> don't use it under X. I have set TERM to wsvt25 but...ok, some colors. I
> think that I might have 8 colors instead of 16 or something,

try TERM=xterm; I've found that to work better on several occasions.