Chapter 1. Introduction
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# Chapter 1. Introduction

Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based MIME mail client. Mutt is highly configurable, and is well suited to the mail power user with advanced features like key bindings, keyboard macros, mail threading, regular expression searches and a powerful pattern matching language for selecting groups of messages.

## 1. Mutt Home Page

The official homepage can be found at http://www.mutt.org/.

## 2. Mailing Lists

To subscribe to one of the following mailing lists, send a message with the word subscribe in the body to list-name`-request@mutt.org`.

- `<mutt-announce-request@mutt.org>` — low traffic list for announcements

- `<mutt-users-request@mutt.org>` — users help users

- `<mutt-dev-request@mutt.org>` — patches, bug reports, feature requests

All messages posted to mutt-announce are automatically forwarded to mutt-users, so you do not need to be subscribed to both lists.

NOTE: You MUST be subscribed to a list in order to post to it. This is not to make your life harder, but to reduce SPAM and/or UCE. The mailing list software being used is GNU Mailman, with its implied deficiencies.

## 3. Getting Mutt

Mutt releases can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.mutt.org/pub/mutt/. For a list of mirror sites, please refer to http://www.mutt.org/download.html.

For version control access, please refer to the Mutt development site.

## 4. Mutt Online Resources

Bug Tracking System

  The official Mutt bug tracking system (not for feature requests) can be found at https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/issues

Wiki

  An (unofficial) wiki can be found at https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/wikis/home.

IRC

  For the IRC user community, visit channel #mutt on irc.libera.chat.

USENET

  For USENET, see the newsgroup comp.mail.mutt.

## 5. Contributing to Mutt

There are various ways to contribute to the Mutt project.

Especially for new users it may be helpful to meet other new and experienced users to chat about Mutt, talk about problems and share tricks.

Since translations of Mutt into other languages are highly appreciated, the Mutt developers always look for skilled translators that help improve and continue to maintain stale translations.

For contributing code patches for new features and bug fixes, please refer to the developer pages at https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt for more details.

## 6. Typographical Conventions

This section lists typographical conventions followed throughout this manual. See table Table 1.1, “Typographical conventions for special terms” for typographical conventions for special terms.

Table 1.1. Typographical conventions for special terms

Item | Refers to...
--- | ---
`printf(3)` | UNIX manual pages, execute `man 3 printf`
`<PageUp>` | named keys
`<create-alias>` | named Mutt function
`^G` | Control+G key combination
$mail_check | Mutt configuration option
`$HOME` | environment variable

Examples are presented as:

    mutt -v

Within command synopsis, curly brackets (“{}”) denote a set of options of which one is mandatory, square brackets (“[]”) denote optional arguments, three dots denote that the argument may be repeated arbitrary times.

## 7. Copyright

Mutt is Copyright © 1996-2026 Michael R. Elkins `<me@mutt.org>` and others.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

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