Fix your mutt

At some point in the recent past, mutt changed the way it generates Message-ID header values. Instead of the perfectly good old way of doing it, the developers switched to using base64-encoded random bytes. The base64 dictionary contains the / character, which causes unnecessary difficulties when linking to these messages on lore.kernel.org, since the / character needs to be escaped as %2F for everything to work properly.

Mutt developers seem completely uninterested in changing this, so please save everyone a lot of trouble and do the following if you're using mutt for your kernel development needs (should work for all mutt versions):

  1. Create a ~/.mutt-hook-fix-msgid file with the following contents (change “mylaptop.local” to whatever you like):

    my_hdr Message-ID: <`uuidgen -r`@mylaptop.local>

  2. Add the following to your ~/.muttrc:

    send-hook . "source ~/.mutt-hook-fix-msgid"

UPDATE: if you have mutt 2.1 or later you can alternatively set the $message_id_format variable to restore the pre-mutt-2.0 behaviour:

# mutt-2.1+ only
set message_id_format = "<%Y%02m%02d%02H%02M%02S.G%c%p@%f>"

Thanks to Thomas Weißschuh for the suggestion!