Re: Tips for mutt and netbsd on run box

["DTB" <trinity@tebibyte.media>]

On Fri Oct 16, 2026 at 2:40 PM MDT, Mats wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I recently got Mutt working on my NetBSD 11, 
> mutt 2.4.2 (2026-08-30), and I thought I would share the 
> essential parts of my .muttrc configuration in case
> they might be useful to someone else.
> I have my app-password in .muttpass so it wouldnt show up here :-)

Thank you Mats for sharing your mutt configuration. I now use mail/aerc
which I prefer, but I configured it to look and feel more like mutt for
my tastes. I've included that configuration in the postscript.

My mutt configuration was very similar to yours, so hopefully we are
both barking up the right tree. I did have a fancier setup, for
acquiring the passwords out of my security/keepassxc password database.
Here are two versions:

This one is a CLI, so you can use it without X, but you have to reopen
the database every time you use it:

keepassxc-cli show -sa password /path/to/Passwords.kdbx \
		Entry_Name \
       | sed 's,.*,set imap_pass = "&"\nset smtp_pass = "&",'

And this one uses secret-tool, with the Secret Service KeePassXC
integration. You might have to rebuild it with the appropriate USE flag
if using pkgin, I don't remember if keepassxc is build with Secret
Service integration by default. I did so to get SSH agent integration
which is also useful. This needs X11 to display the secret-tool (or
Wayland if it works, but for me wm/velox had an iffy time trying to do
this when I was running this on i386 years back) to display the
secret-tool.

secret-tool lookup Title Entry_Name \
       | sed 's/.*/set imap_pass = "&"\nset smtp_pass = "&"/'

I put the command line alone in a file in
.mutt/email%address.com@localhost/password, next to
.mutt/email%address.com@localhost/muttrc. Each of my addresses' muttrcs ended
with:

source "~/.mutt/muttrc"
source "~/.mutt/email%address.com@localhost/passwords |"

Which was a little clunky, but worked.

Happy hacking.
<3 :3 -3

P.S. this is aerc configuration that makes aerc look a little more like
mutt:

[ui]
column-date={{dateFormat .Date "2006-01-02 15:04"}}
column-name={{index (.From | names) 0}}
column-flags={{.Flags | join ""}}
column-separator=" "
column-size=({{.Size | humanReadable}})
column-subject={{.ThreadPrefix}}{{if .ThreadFolded}}{{printf "{%d}"
.ThreadCount}}{{end}}{{.Subject}}
empty-dirlist=[no folders]
empty-message=[no messages]
index-columns=flags>4,date<16,name<15,size>7,subject<*
new-message-bell=true
sidebar-width=10
sort="-r date"
timestamp-format=2006-01-02 15:04

I found aerc to be generally a little easier to configure and use than
mutt because it's built around IMAP, but if you prefer downloading your
e-mails to read them later you're better off sticking to mutt or neomutt
(to which I switched from mutt, but to be honest I never knew the
difference).