Mutt - a great MUA

t-prot, a TOFU protection script

You know these misformatted mail or news messages, with full quotes, too long signatures, and lots of exclamation marks? They get on your nerves day by day? That's what this script is for. Please see the documentation for the details.

TOFU Protection Mini-Howto:

• Step 1: INSTALLATION
  Put the TOFU protection script into your $PATH, and the script's manpage into section 1 of your $MANPATH.
• Step 2: CONFIGURATION
  Append something like
  set display_filter="t-prot -cemt -M=mutt"
  to your ~/.muttrc. You can download an example which can be included in your ~/.muttrc using the source command. And here is an example S-Lang macro for easy usage with the news reader slrn.
• Of course you can use t-prot outside mutt (or any other MUA) -- t-prot just follows the great Unix tradition of reading from one file (default is stdin) and writing to another (default is stdout).

Alternatively, you may download the latest tarball (or install the package fitting your system):

• Plain .tar.gz tarballs
• Debian Packages (some more information can be found here) built by Gerfried Fuchs -- many thanks!
• There are t-prot RPMs for the SuSE distribution (although they removed most examples from their package).
  Those for OpenSuSE are a bit newer, though.
• FreeBSD has made a t-prot port.
• Matthias Kilian has built a t-prot port for OpenBSD. Many thanks!
• Gentoo has some t-prot Ebuilds.
• Darwinports does not exist any more, please use its replacement MacPorts to install t-prot on MacOS-X.
• (Inofficial) Slackware packages, provided by Clemens Buchmann. Many thanks!
• NetBSD's pkgsrc system offers a t-prot port.
• Archlinux has included t-prot in its AUR.

If you desire to know what's up with the last update, see the ChangeLog.

Screenshots: #1, #2, #3, #5, #6.

Jeff Covey wrote a great Freshmeat article about t-prot -- if you want a good, solid introduction, just read it!

Similar projects:

• A configurable display filter by Hugo Haas. Interesting, but with quite a different goal.
• Phil! Gregory uses sed(1) for his lightweight mutt-display-filter.
• The mail and news reader Gnus tries some ways called "washing" to make postings more readable.

Pagerfilter Patch

By now, the patch seems obsolete, at least for current stable mutt versions. On earlier versions, $display_filter was somewhat more unstable, so just to be sure, you can still download the Geraffel and the md5 sums.

Editorfilter Patch

OK, now the pager filters out any unwanted TOFU, but if you reply to a TOFU'ed mail, you *still* have to repair these misedited mails. So there is some need for just another filter...

Finally I found the time and hacked something together. You can download it, but please keep in mind that it is just a hack -- if anything goes wrong, don't blame me.

Usage: Just append a line like
set edit_filter='t-prot -cemtS --body --lax-security -i%s -o%s'
to your ~/.muttrc. Make sure that mutt's tmpdir is set to something readable just by you, e.g. "~/tmp/mutt".

Future plans:
The patch is not ready for inclusion into vanilla mutt at all, as PGP encrypted messages are not processed by the filter. Luckily, people encrypting their messages tend to write quite legible messages in the first place, so this issue does not rate very high on my TODO list: I am using the patch for all my daily mail, so I guess it's just scratching my itch. If you like to work on the patch, be my guest (and send some feedback, please).

Mutt Configuration Helper

For our local Linux User Group, Björn Bürger hacked a nice little script you may use to put together your very personal mutt configuration file. Right now, it is quite outdated, and even not fully compatible with recent versions of mutt. Most probably the result won't work for you.

So, I absent-mindedly volunteered for rewriting the thing. Keeping in mind that I recently worked on a system implemented on top of the new Linux kernel config system, it is no surprise the new mutt configurator uses kconfig too.

Right now the thing is in early alpha stadium, but actually downloading, patching, building, and configuring mutt from source works quite well (if you don't care that most people will need features that aren't there yet).

However, the thing is free, and it is fun. You can download a tarball here. Some feedback would be really welcome. ;)