Changing Mutt's defaults- possible?

[Russ Pitman]

 A couple of 'wishlist'ask's

[1]
Is it possible to configure Mutt so that the default opening page is the
'index' rather than the spool mailbox,or alternately have a single key on
the top line set to jump to the index page.

[2]
Can the 'N' flags in the index list be configured so that they remain set
until all the folder's contents have been read irrespective of how many
times the folder is acessed or mutt is restarted.

If either is yes what do I go to set it up.

Hopefully:-
-- 
                    ----russ----