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Re: Mutt on Mac: MuttToMail

On Sat 13 Jun 2009 at 08:41:36 PDT John Velman wrote:

For those who don't know:  On Mac an "application" is a special kind of
file containing an executable and a bunch of other stuff.  On Mac, one can
designate a default mail program, but it must be an "application"  Mutt, as
it stands, isn't an "application".  When one clicks on a "mailto" url, the
default mail application comes up with a blank message (except for the
"To") ready to go.

It is kind of irritating to suddenly have a Mac Mail or Thunderbird window
show up!  To get Mutt to be the default requires putting it into an
"application" wrapper.

I've begun to know enough Mac Cocoa programming to think about making a
Cocoa application wrapper for Mutt.

BUT:  Someone already did it, Years ago!  By accident, I found the
reference to MailToMutt on the Mutt Wiki a few days ago.

The project and MailToMutt mailing lists seem to be pretty inactive -
developer messages posted in 2004, one user message posted in 2006.

Is anyone else using this?  Or is there something newer and "better"?

Anyway, I installed it on my Mac, it works fine on Leopard (so far), and I
used it to subscribe to this list.

Thanks to the developers, wherever they are!


By coincidence, I just downloaded and installed MuttToMail last night.
I agree with you that it fills a much-needed niche.

My only complaint is that it uses Terminal.app to launch mutt.  I prefer
iTerm because, among other things, it can emulate a 256-color terminal
that works with the colors I've so painstakingly defined in my muttrc
(and vimrc).  Looking at the source code, I see that MuttToMail is using
Applescript to talk to Terminal and that there's really only one line of
code that needs to be changed to make it talk to iTerm instead.  So my
project for the weekend is to play around with some iTerm scripts to see
if I can get it to work.  If anyone's interested in the results, I can
share them off-list.