Mutt and Archiveopteryx

Mutt is a mostly-textual mail reader with IMAP support. It's usually used on Unix.

Mutt can access Archiveopteryx archives via IMAP. Its friend msmtp can be used to send outgoing mail from mutt via Archiveopteryx.

Mutt's IMAP support is extremely costly on big mailboxes. It downloads a lot of information about all messages every time it opens a mailbox, and caches absolutely nothing. Performance is particularly weak if PostgreSQL 8.1 is used. (We recommend using PostgreSQL 8.3 anyway.)

Mutt can be compiled using TLS support from either GnuTLS or OpenSSL. If it's compiled with GnuTLS and used with Archiveopteryx 3.1.2 or earlier, then a GnuTLS bug results in the error message tls_socket_read (A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.) and the connection is aborted. Mutt compiled with OpenSSL works well.

We suggest disabling auth-anonymous if Mutt is to be used, since Mutt prefers to log in as Anonymous even if explicitly told to use a different login name.

Mutt occasionally crashes if you use both it and another client to access the same mailbox at the same time, particularly if you delete mail with the other client. This is a mutt problem; it doesn't handle the kind of situations described in RFC 2180 (IMAP4 Multi-Accessed Mailbox Practice, published July 1997).

In case of questions, please write to info@aox.org.

Relevant links

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Last modified: 2010-11-19
Location: aox.org/clients/mutt