mutt: automatically fetch remote IMAP folder list

Question

I know that I can explicitly set a remote IMAP folder in .muttrc

mailboxes imaps://$my_server/INBOX.myfolder

I have some 30 folders in my account: is it possible to have mutt to automatically fetch the IMAP remote folders list so that I can navigate them?

Answer 1

There is an option for your config file:

imap_check_subscribed
       Type: boolean
       Default: no

       When set, mutt will fetch the set of subscribed folders from
       your server on connection, and add them to the set of mailboxes
       it polls for new mail just as if you had issued individual
       “mailboxes” commands.

Of course this only works for subscribed folders and only after your first connection to the server.

Answer 2

You don’t specify what you actually see and how you try to “fetch the IMAP remote folders list” but the default behaviour when Mutt is compiled with IMAP support is to list all folders. Presumably, your Mutt configuration contains changes from the default settings.

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By default, when Mutt browses the list of available IMAP folders (e.g., after using c to open another mailbox), it uses the IMAP LIST Command to retrieve the list of folders and the server returns all folders that exist for the user’s account.

To change this behaviour, the imap_list_subscribed configuration option can be set to yes. In this case, Mutt uses the IMAP LSUB Command when retrieving folder names from the server: this retrieves only the list of folders that are marked as being subscribed on the IMAP server.

This variable configures whether IMAP folder browsing will look for only subscribed folders or all folders.