Mutt was originally designed as a Mail User Agent (MUA) and relied on locally accessible mailbox and sendmail infrastructure.

It allows for changing all the key bindings and making keyboard macros for complex actions, as well as the colors and the layout of most of the interface.

Through variants of a concept known as "hooks", many of its settings can be changed based on criteria such as current mailbox or outgoing message recipients.

[7] Alternatively, users can search their mail stores from Mutt by calling grep via a Bash script.

[8] Mutt is often used by security professionals or security-conscious users because of its smaller attack surface compared with other clients that ship with a web browser rendering engine or a JavaScript interpreter.