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The Cygwin tools are ports of the
popular GNU development tools for
Microsoft Windows. They run thanks to the Cygwin library which
provides the UNIX system calls and environment these programs expect.
Since February 2001 there is a maintained
package of Mutt
for Cygwin, with both sources and binaries.
It is available in the 'contrib' directory of all
mirrors of the Cygwin ftp site.
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Installation:
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If you have not installed Cygwin already read the
Installations Instructions
in the Cygwin FAQ first.
The actual installation is then as easy as to download and run
http://cygwin.com/setup.exe.
Click the "View" button til you have the category view. You will find
Mutt in the "Mail" category. When you tag Mutt for installation all
packages that Mutt relies on will also be selected automatically
(but they will not be unselected if you unselect mutt).
If you rather do the setup by hand (download and extract the files)
there is a setup.hint file in each directory of a cygwin
package to tell you (or setup.exe) what other packages are
needed. Manual installation is not recommended nor supported by
the Cygwin community.
After installation you should, among others, have:
/usr/bin/mutt.exe
/usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe
as well as the full manuals.
Like for most other Unix programs you read the manual by typing:
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Setup:
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All pre-compiled Cygwin packages come with a README file in the
/usr/doc/Cygwin/ directory if there are any Cygwin specific comments
on the port or how to use it.
There is no difference setting Mutt up for Cygwin or for Unix.
If you are not happy with the default settings you can alter them either
system wide, for all users, or personally, for you alone.
The system wide configuration file is named /etc/Muttrc.
Your personal muttrc is located in your home directory where you may choose
to name it either ~/.muttrc or ~/.mutt/muttrc.
The muttrc configuration file is described in
'man muttrc',
and discussed in the
manual.
(Section 3: Configuration,
Section 6.2: Configuration Commands, and
Section 6.3: Configuration variables)
Some good lines to add to your personal .muttrc are
realname,
from, and
alternates.
You should also tell where your mails are stored by setting
spoolfile,
folder,
mbox, and
record.
Also look at variables such as
imap_user,
pop_user and
pop_host
if you have an Imap or Pop account.
This should be enough to let you use Mutt, but most everything
is configurable if you wish.
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$HOME/.mutt/muttrc
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set realname = "Ulf Erikson"
set from = "[email protected]"
# set alternates = 'user@(first|second)\.org'
set spoolfile = "~/Mail/inbox"
set folder = "~/Mail"
set mbox = "+received"
set record = "+sent"
set pop_host = "pop.mail.yahoo.com"
set pop_user = "ulferikson"
# set pop_pass = ""
set sendmail = "/usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe"
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Easiest way to write your first fully configuring muttrc is by
using the automated rc-builder.
After that, look at others rc files to see what more is possible to do.
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Compiling:
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Earlier one needed all kinds of tricks and patches to compile Mutt
for Cygwin. But, now, with a somewhat recent version of the Cygwin
tools, Mutt compiles right away without any patches.
First take a look at files like
README and INSTALL.
Then run ./configure --help and see what compile options
you need (maybe that could be --prefix=/usr and --with-homespool).
After that all what is missing is
./configure (with your options)
make
make install
There are a few Cygwin specific patches though:
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One issue is the problem
with DOS text files. For a text mounted directory the number of
characters returned when reading afile differ from the file
size. Mounting all directories in binary mode is the easiest way
around this, but then also all configuration files need to be
written with Unix style line endings (which isn't a real problem,
but not what everyone wants. hence the patches).
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Another problem is limitations in the underlying file system.
Not FAT nor NTFS allow a colon ':' in filenames, which is required
for Maildirs.
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Also, with FAT, the time of last editing for each file is only remembered
with two seconds accuracy. This can give "update encoding"-nags.
Use the patches if any of these problems bites you.
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Links:
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- Mutt
- Cygwin
- Mailing lists:
- [email protected] mailing list archive -- for questions about how to compile and install cygwin programs
- [email protected] mailing list archive -- for questions about how to configure and run mutt
- Port instructions for Mutt:
- Cygwin binaries of various (mail related) Unix programs and libraries:
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Mutt on Cygwin