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2. Installation

Installing Mutt is rather painless through the use of the GNU autoconf package. Simply untar the Mutt distribution, and run the configure script. In most cases, it will automatically determine everything it needs to know in order to compile. However, there are a few options to configure to help it out, or change the default behavior:

--prefix=directory

install Mutt in directory instead of /usr/local

--with-cursesinclude=directory

uses the curses.h found in directory

--with-curseslib=directory

look for libncurses in directory

--with-homespool=file

treat file in the user's home directory as the spool mailbox

--disable-domain

force Mutt to not append the FQDN to unqualified addresses

--enable-pop

enable POP3 support

--enable-hidden-host

local hostname is not part of the FQDN.

--enable-random-sig

enable the random signature code

--enable-dsn

enable Delivery Status Notification (DNS) support

--enable-8bitmime

enable the use of the -B option to sendmail 8.x

Once configure has completed, simply type make install.

Mutt should compile cleanly (without errors) and you should end up with a binary called mutt. If you get errors about undefined symbols like A_NORMAL or KEY_MIN, then you probably don't have a SysV compliant curses library. You should install the GNU ncurses package and then run the configure script again.


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