So, I have read the man page, and looked over the Muttrc file and I am a bit over whelmed. I have two email addresses I need to set up for viewing, an exchange work address, and a personal imap address.

Can anyone point me to an idiots guide to setting this up.

Try googling 'mutt tutorial for beginners' - you'll get quite a few pages. I agree Mutt is not the easiest one to set up. A few years ago I managed to configure it with 3 email accounts, but it took me some time. I know it doesn't answer your question but you might also want to try alpine, which is much simpler to set up.

Mutt comes with extensive documentation about pretty much everything. Look into /usr/doc and specifically the file named manual.txt.
Its quite long, but explains every setting available and its the way to go. If you want a for dummies, search the internet. There's lots of guides. Start at wiki.mutt.org.

Mutt is a pain to configure and is very daunting. I think I started here and found some other links as well detailing both IMAP and POP3 e-mail setup. I do not use mutt's built-in IMAP/POP3 support (though you can if you like) and instead opt to use fetchmail/procmail for POP3 and offlineimap for IMAP accounts. This keeps everything separate and allows mutt to be a dummy reader and nothing more (and of course I can send e-mail as well)...but of course that may not be desirable to all. The hardest part for me was figuring out how to include multiple accounts while keeping them completely separate (separate reply-to info, separate SMTP servers [assuming you don't want to use sendmail directly], and keeping each inbox separate). I came up with an inelegant solution that does exactly what I want. I set one of my e-mail accounts as the default (setting spoolfile, from, etc. to point to one account) and setup macros that switch that information with certain key combinations (Ctrl+key changes the active directory [I use maildirs], the smtp server to use [the sendmail variable], the from value, and the realname value). Whenever I send an e-mail it goes from the account of the inbox I'm currently viewing and each account is kept separate so I know there isn't going to be any funny business.

My solution may not be ideal so if you can find a better one, by all means, have at it. Just thought I'd share my general setup.

Quick and simplistic approach, which may or may not be appropriate for you -- add this to your ~/.muttrc:
Replace protocols, names, and ports as needed.

Even if that gets you up and running, you're going to need to poke around for some more extensive documentation. Many, many options to be aware of.

Great page that one and I believe the author is a Slackware user as well .

Was he the guy who did the slrn page as well?

This site is very nice for an introduction to the setup and elements of mutt as well as relevant programs to use together with it. I used this guide when I started out with this great mail program.

http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/

This site is a fine place to go for things not covered by the other site:

http://www.spocom.com/users/gjohnson/mutt/

Whoever is giving you the email address is important in MUTT. I have been using a few years, and found essentially this information important for securing MUTT email logins. For SMTP its tricky, and your email provider should have two smtp urls for the .muttrc phrase:

set smtp url = "smtps://some.sslverifiedhost-from-your-provider.com:theportnumber/"

Note the "smtps:". The extra 's' is important in slackware to use MUTT. It makes all the difference. Not 'smtp', but needing an 's'. Your email provider should have 2 distinct smtps hosts: one for high security, one for less security. Typically, the low security host resembles your own domain name. The higher security smtps address is some weird certificate providing server like "terminator.websitewelcome.com". Your .muttrc has to reflect this SSL host to authenticate.

These are the only undocumented snags I ran into on slackware. Otherwise, the normal MUTT tutorials should work. If your email address comes from a hosting account you bought, then it is in the CPANEL under email that you will find the separate authentication addresses.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMTPS

If you are using 2 email addresses, a good trick is to forward the email from one address to the other, and use only one with mutt, the destination email that the others forward to. I have 3 email addresses forwarding to each other.

Another useful trick is setting up HTML email viewing by putting in your .muttrc this line:

auto_view text/html

I believe that is all I did to get HTML weeded out. Otherwise you have a jumble of hard to read html and text stuff.

http://wiki.mutt.org/?MuttFaq/Attachment