Neomutt and Outlook

Neomutt is a great way to read, send and manage your email. In this tutorial we will configure neomutt to be able to synchronize e-mails with Outlook (or other popular e-mail provider) addresses! By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to manually synchronize your emails using the mailsync command and read/manage your emails in an interface that looks like so:

Apologies for the blur, but I dont want you to read my e-mails.

First Things First

First, sign in to your mail through the browser. This is needed for the OAuth2 authorization flow.

You should also obviously install neomutt. This can just be done through your package manager. As I am using Arch linux, I will do so using pacman, but on Ubuntu or Debian you should use apt:

pacman -S neomutt

GPG

The first thing you’ll need is a gpg key for encryption purposes. You can check your keys using gpg --list-keys. If you don’t already have a gpg key, you can generate one with the --full-gen-key flag.

gpg --full-gen-key

OAuth2

As part of installing neomutt, you should have the oauth2 python script located in /usr/share/neomutt/oauth2/. We need to register neomutt as an already trusted app. We will simply abuse the thunderbird client-id for this, which is: 9e5f94bc-e8a4-4e73-b8be-63364c29d753 - with this you don’t need to specify a client secret:

/usr/share/neomutt/oauth2/mutt_oauth2.py \
    -v \
    -t \
    --authorize \
    --client-id "9e5f94bc-e8a4-4e73-b8be-63364c29d753" \
    --client-secret "" \
    --email "your-email-here" \
    --provider microsoft \
    $HOME/email-token

This will ask you a couple questions. Select authcode for the preferred OAuth2 flow. If prompted for a client secret, simply press enter. You should get a link - enter that link into your browser and allow the app. By the end of the flow you should end up at an empty website. Copy the last part of the URL and paste it into your terminal. After this you should have a token file located at $HOME/email-token. It’s a good idea to take a backup of this file just in case you overwrite it. But if you do loose it, you can just run the flow again.

Mutt-Wizard

We are almost there! The wonderful Luke Smith has made a neat setup wizard called mutt-wizard. Install (see the mutt-wizard website), run it and enter your email information. After this, you should edit your ~/.mbsyncrc file, as the default PassCmd is not quite configured yet. It should look something like this (make sure to change your-email-here and username to the appropriate values):

...
PassCmd "/usr/share/neomutt/oauth2/mutt_oauth2.py --encryption-pipe 'gpg -e -r your-email-here' /home/username/email-token"
...

You should now be able to run mailsync (installed with mutt-wizard):

mailsync

It might ask you to select which profile to sync. Just provide the name you set when setting up your gpg profile and everything should sync now! After a successful sync, you should be able to just open neomutt and start reading, replying and whatever you do with email!

neomutt