According to Wikipedia, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), together with POP is one of the most popular protocols for email retrieval. In this short tutorial I will show you how to set up KMail (the default email client in KDE4 and also most - if not all - distributions which ship it, like Kubuntu) with a GMail account, using IMAP as a protocol.

This page is a guide to using the email client Mutt to send, receive and read email on an Ubuntu computer using a Gmail account as a relay as well as a description of my own path to this goal.

"Like many folks, I use Google for more and more. When I noticed Google's announcement that Gmail supports IMAP, I knew I could read my Gmail from Emacs..."

Mutt is a text based email client that is both powerful and has a lot of features,some of which you will not find in other mail clients. One problem that you will see with many mail clients is that they do not work easily with IMAPS, or secure IMAP. Mutt integrates easily with IMAPS and is easy to set up.

"I can’t believe this can be so difficult! I’ve for a long time used Emacs and VM for one of a couple of email accounts. It’s great, fast and wonderful. However, Emacs VM doesn’t deal with IMAP that well and I decided last month to ditch it for Mutt [...] So now, I get full UTF-8 support as well as Emacs shortcuts when running Mutt/Emacs inside an SSH session! "

The Mutt MUA started in 1995 when Michael Elkins wrote the first version. It's powerful, light-weight, made for CLI, and tends to suck less than do other email clients. It's my MUA of choice, and if you've never used it (or haven't in a while), you may want to give it a try. For the purposes of this little tutorial, I am going to assume that you use Gmail (who doesn't these days?).

I've been using GMail ever since they decided to allow users to download their mail using POP. I was happy reading my email as usual in mutt. The only problem was that I had to log onto the website once in a while to clear out my spam folder and fish out the false positives.

Mutt is a text-based e-mail client for Unix-like systems. It was originally written by Michael Elkins in 1995 and released under the GNU General Public License. -- (wikipedia)

I still use the command-line mail client mutt to handle my mail. One of mutt's advantages is the wide range of keyboard commands you can use to do various useful tasks. Here's a selection of the ones I use regularly.