The sidebar in Mutt is useful if you have multiple email accounts and want to switch between them quickly. It shows you each inbox with a number of unread emails. I have 6 Gmail accounts plugged into my Mutt and here is what I used to see.

INBOX (1)
INBOX
INBOX (2)
INBOX (1)
INBOX (7)
INBOX

And I had to remember which one was which. Let’s say you have your mailboxes in ~/.mail.

$ ls ~/.mail
work home

Create a directory called aliases and symlink the inboxes to that directory:

$ ln -s ~/.mail/work/INBOX ~/.mail/alias/work
$ ln -s ~/.mail/home/INBOX ~/.mail/alias/home

Then, point your Mutt sidebar config at those. When you open Mutt the next time, it should look like this

work (1)
home (8)

That’s much more useful than just a list of INBOX things.