Tips for using Mutt, the text-based mail client
Mutt is a text-based mail client for Unix/Linux. It performs really well when you handle a lot of email daily and want to stay with your favorite text editor such as Vim or Emacs rather than some editor that is built into some mail clients.
This article does not mean to persuade you to switch to Mutt. There are some other articles that do this job much better. Here we describe some useful Mutt tips.
Dealing with Exchange meeting invitations
If your email server is Microsoft Exchange, then you will receive meeting invitations from time to time. Usually it is not problem if you don't have many meetings. You can just note down the meeting's subject, location and time in one file and reference it from time to time. However it becomes hard to track when you have many meetings or some meetings happen biweekly. In this case you may have to use Exchange's Calendar functionality to manage them.
If you are like us, it is most likely that you have downloaded all the email to your local machine and don't leave any copy on the server. Now the question becomes how you can import the invitation to your calendar. Switching to Microsoft Outlook all together is simply out of the question.
You may be able to "bounce" the message to yourself. However, you need to stop your mail fetching process (fetchmail) and then sign into the Exchange Web interface to read the email and accept or decline the invitation. Afterwards, you need to start the mail fetching process again. This is really onerous. We also find that sometimes bouncing the email doesn't work, i.e., we don't get any email.
We find one solution to this. First, you sign into the Exchange Web interface and create one folder that is at the same level as your INBOX folder and holds all the invitations you want to track. This just needs to be done once.
Second, whenever you receive an invitation and need to add it to your
calendar, you can copy the email to your invitation folder on the
Exchange server. Suppose your Exchange server's name is
exchange.example.com, then you can just provide
imaps://exchange.example.com/Invites when you are
prompted for the folder you need to copy the email to. You will
need to sign into the Exchange server through IMAP from Mutt.
Once you have copied all the invitations, you can sign into the Exchange Web interface, navigate to the invitation folder and then add them to your calendar.
We know this also involves some manual work. Hopefully you don't need to do that much often. The greatest benefit is that you can still stay with Mutt most of the time.