Security Experts Swear By 20-Year-Old Mail Client Mutt

Regular Internet users are advised to use the latest software, but in the case of e-mail clients swear some security experts at the 20-year-old Mutt. Mutt is a small text-based mail client for Unix systems.The latest stable release dated June 9, 2007, although there last week released a new preview version.

Mutt is characterized by its simplicity. The software does not support HTML or emails with JavaScript. It is also for this reason that security for Mutt choose. "Simplicity is security," says Marek Tuszynski of the Tactical Technology Collective in front of Vice Magazine. Tools that run from the command line are characterized by a simpler design, fewer lines of code and the absence of vulnerable code such as Java or Flash. Therefore these types of programs will generally contain fewer bugs and be more stable.

Security researcher Christopher Soghoian says that he does not want his email client also contains the rendering engine of a web browser or JavaScript can handle. "The smaller the attack surface, the better," he tells. Mutt consists of "only" 100,000 lines code. Much less than the 14 million lines of Firefox and the 17.4 million of Chromium, the open source browser, which is the basis for Google Chrome. Due to the spartan look and feel is to use command line tools like Mutt mostly limited to technical users, even if they offer more safety than the programs in which the masses participate.