The way it works is:

  • You’re reading an email on Mutt and you think: Oh, I should really remember that because I need to do X.
  • You pass this email to emacs’ org-mode containing:
    • the subject, the date and the from
    • a link to that email which is mutt:Message-ID
  • You add some information if you wish to, and you save this in your org-mode todo file.

Now, you’re in your org-mode todo list, you can work with it as usual. Now you have this bit, and you need to remember what it’s about exactly. You can click the link in org-mode, and it will open Mutt and show you the right email in Mutt!

Make mutt-open work with mutt-sidebar

I used mutt-sidebar and I couldn’t get ./mutt-open to work correctly. I fixed this by changing:

HIDE_SIDEBAR_CMD="B"     # set to empty string if sidebar is not used

You need to update B with whatever you use to toggle the sidebar. I use CTRL-B so I changed it to HIDE_SIDEBAR_CMD="\CB". That’s it!

This is the due to the fact that mutt-open has something called mutt_keys that’s used to display the right email in mutt. However in its current state mutt_keys decides to toggle the sidebar before it actually shows the email. Hence if the toggle sidebar key is not well defined in mutt-open, mutt will hang up there. So I changed this to:

mutt_keys="/=i$msgid\n\n$HIDE_SIDEBAR_CMD"

Make mutt-open work with mutt-kz

Since mutt-kz comes with a sidebar as well, the previous paragraph applies. But you might need further changes to the original mutt-open script. Here’s how mine works:

mutt_keys="<vfolder-from-query>id:$msgid\n\n<entire-thread>"