IMAP Mutt Configs

I want to keep all my email on my email server, and all my creds in lastpass. And still use mutt.

This config pulls my IMAP password from lastpass just long enough to pass through a named-pipe to mutt.

I've seen this work with both Gmail and MS Exchange (through the excellent davmail.)

Prereqs

Mutt or Neomutt
A lastpass account
The lpass CLI
jq
A terminal with a recent version of bash, mkfifo, mktemp, etc
- If you're using a mac, you'll have to brew install bash to get a bash newer than version 3.
If your email is on an MS Exchange server, you'll also need to install and configure davmail

If you're on a mac, most of this stuff can be brew installed.

brew install bash lastpass-cli jq mutt urlview

If you're on linux you'll find similar stuff in your favourite package manager.

Getting Going

Get these scripts, setup your creds, then run imutt:

Get scripts

Clone this repo somewhere, and add that somewhere to your path. For example:

git clone https://github.com/totherme/imutt.git ~/bin/imutt
cd ~/bin/imutt
git submodule update --init
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/bin/imutt:$PATH' >> ~/.profile

Setup creds

First, create a lastpass note at path Personal/email-creds, with contents like the following:

{
  "user-email-address": "me@where.ever.i.live",
  "user-full-name": "My Name",
  "imap-address": "imap.gmail.com or similar",
  "smtp-address": "smtp.gmail.com or similar",
  "smtp-port": "587 or similar",
  "username": "my-username",
  "password": "my-password",
  "mailboxes": "\"+my-first-inbox\" \"+my-second-inbox\" \"etc\""
}

The imutt-edit-creds script can help with this.

If you're using gmail, you'll have to enable 2 factor auth, and create an app specific password. This is the password that you'll need to put in your creds -- not your regular google password.

If you're using Exhange and davmail, you'll want to add a few extra fields to your creds JSON to prevent mutt from attempting to encrypt your connection to your local proxy:

{
  "smtp-method": "smtp",
  "imap-port": "my davmail local imap port",
  "imap-method": "imap",
  "force-tls": "no"
}

Run

imutt

How to use

If you're not familiar with mutt, check out the manual. Note that any email aliases you create will be stored in lastpass at the path Personal/email-aliases. You can hand-edit this file with imutt-edit-aliases.

This config adds only a couple of non-standard bindings. My philosophy is an inbox-zero-like one. Here's my email workflow:

Open one of my inboxes, and read the mail in it.
- There may be messages I don't need to read -- I can tell just from looking at the sender and subject that they can be ignored. For these emails, instead of hitting enter to read them, I hit d for done. This marks the messages as read. It does not delete them.
- If there are messages I need to deal with later, I can hit F to flag them as important (like "starring" them in gmail), and add whatever note I need to add in an external todo list.
- If there are messages which aren't filed correctly, I hit B to open that email in my web browser in gmail. Here I can create a new filter so that the next time an email like this arrives, it will be filed correctly.
- Of course I can reply with r, group reply with g and so on.
Open another inbox, or quit mutt. Either way, all read emails will be moved into an archive folder. If I was just reading the folder ${MBOX}, then the read emails will be moved to ${MBOX}-archive.

Philosophy and limitations

This config is intended to be fairly safe to use on pairing workstations. In that environment, we don't want to leave emails or creds on the local disk. With no local copies, every time we open a mailbox we're reading data over the network, and hence loading large inboxes can be annoyingly slow. It therefore makes sense to develop a habit of keeping "read mail" in archives where I rarely look, and "new or unactioned email" in small inboxes that load fast when I need them.

If you want a mutt config for a machine that only you ever use, this may not be for you. You might find you'd prefer to keep copies of your email locally, perhaps synced in the background with a tool like offlineimap.