Installing non-ports software into /usr/local

[Jamie Paul Griffin]

Hi

I am having an issue with mutt 1.5.21. I have set up different colour schemes, etc. as people do. Anyway, I reinstalled it 2 days ago using the ports system, because I wanted to link mutt to the ncurses port rather than the system ncurses installation. After soing non of my colours show, only those that are set from within my terminal emulator which is urxvt. Initially, I had a problem during make(1) which related to the iconv library. I have iconv set as an option in my kernel configuration. the error suggested something about using libiconv instead. 

Anyway, I managed to overcome that and build it and istall it again but without colour. I'm wondering if I could/should build it my self from source and install it into /usr/local to see if that makes any difference. Would doing that cause problems for the ports system?

Any comments and advice are welcome. Best wishes, Jamie