How does Mutt connect to the IMAP server?
Mutt supports a tunneling driver which allows you to connect using, eg, an SSH pipe which invokes your IMAP server directly on the remote machine. Finally, you can specify a shell command to be run before every connection attempt, which may for instance use SSH to set up encrypted port-forwarding between mutt and the IMAP server.
Can you use SSL on a mutt mailbox?
To use SSL, specify your IMAP mailbox starting with imaps:instead of imap:. Mutt also supports TLS, which means that if your server does too, you can negotiate SSL over a normal IMAP connection (using imap:).
What kind of authentication methods does Mutt support?
Mutt also knows about several authentication methods which don’t send your password across the network: it has native support for CRAM-MD5 and GSSAPI (Kerberos) authentication, and if compiled with the Cyrus SASL library it can support numerous other methods (and more can be added by upgrading your SASL library, without recompiling mutt!).
Why does Mutt ask if the server supports TLS?
Whether or not this happens depends on the mutt quadoption ssl_starttls, which defaults to ask-yes, meaning that if, and only if, the server supports TLS, mutt will ask you whether it should encrypt the connection before authenticating.
What to do if Mutt does not authenticate?
This is a colon-delimited list of methods mutt may try, in the order it should try them. If any of these methods are available but fail, or none of them are available, mutt will fail to authenticate. For example, if you only want to use GSSAPI to authenticate, you could set imap_authenticators=”gssapi”
Where do I find the Mutt configuration file?
Mutt will, by default, search six locations for its configuration file; ~/.muttrc, ~/.mutt/muttrc, and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mutt/muttrc, first with -MUTT_VERSION appended, then without. Any of these locations will work. In case you decide to put the initialization file somewhere else, use $ mutt -F /path/to/.muttrc.