You need to be running mutt inside a screen session for this to work (you'd know if you were). If you haven't tried screen before, I suggest you give it a go - it's a great little program. If you don't want to use screen, you can probably get the same effect by changing the last line of the script to something like: xterm -e sh -c "mutt -f \"$BOX\" -e \"exec $1\"; rm -f \"$BOX\"" & (though I haven't checked if that'll work exactly as shown) - Andrew