mutt is traditionally used together with a mail transfer agent (MTA) and other software to fetch the e-mail. mutt is only used for reading e-mail, not sending,

mutt is traditionally used together with a mail transfer agent (MTA) and other software to fetch the e-mail. mutt is only used for reading e-mail, not sending, receiveing or writing, there's other software for that. There's POP, IMAP and SMTP support in mutt for convinience, but that has to be enabled explicitly at compile time. However, this means that mutt will fetch all the mails when it starts and this is slower than having it already locally fetched.