There are many text-based mail programs for reading, sending, and working with your mail. Many
of these programs have been around for a long time, so they are full of features and have been well
debugged. As a group, however, they are not very intuitive.
Most of these programs use the value of your $MAIL environment variable as your local
mailbox. Usually, that location is /var/spool/mail/user, where user is your username.
If you use Thunderbird but want to try out one of the text-based e-mail clients, you can set your
$MAIL so that it points to your Thunderbird mailbox. This will enable you to use either Thunderbird or
a text-based mail program. Add the following line to one of your startup files:
export MAIL=$HOME/.thunderbird/*.default/*/Mail/accountname/Inbox
Replace accountname in the command with the name of an e-mail account you set up. If you usually
use Thunderbird for mail, set this variable temporarily to try out some of these mail programs.
Mail readers described in the following sections are text-based and use the entire Terminal window
(or other shell display). Although some features are different, menu bars show available options
right on the screen.
Mutt Mail Reader
The mutt command is a text-based, full-screen mail user agent for reading and sending e-mail.
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