Saving a email as file in mutt?

Question

When I press S in mutt, it saves the mail to a mail folder format (cur/ tmp/ new/), but I want a single file to be saved, just like how the attachment is saved, is that configurable?

Answer 1

The actual message shows up as an attachment as well, so you can save it from the attachment list. From either the index or the message itself, hit v to open the attachments and s to save

Answer 2

The s command saves to a mailbox, which for you is in maildir format. Unfortunately, there is no save-to-file command, perhaps because in the historical mbox format, a mailbox that contains a single mail is just a file containing that mail.

The mutt command pipe-message (default shortcut |) can be used for this. It opens a command line and you write cat > DESIRED-FILE-PATH.

The "pipe-decode" option controls what happens to headers and mime parts when you save a message this way.

One could probably write a macro for this functionality.