First of all. Mutt doesn't suck a lot, only a little. Then the issue. Propably everybody knows the topic's lesson already. However, I did not. As a result I burned the whole morning to find it out the hard way.

A hook is a concept borrowed to Mutt from the EMACS editor which allows user to execute arbitrary commands before performing some operation. Mutt manual has the following note regarding hooks:

Note: if a hook changes configuration settings, these changes remain effective until the end of the current mutt session. As this is generally not desired, a default hook needs to be added before all other hooks to restore configuration defaults. Here is an example with send-hook and the my_hdr directive:

send-hook . 'unmy_hdr From:'
send-hook [email protected] my_hdr from: [email protected]

The save-hook is "used to override the default filename used when saving messages". What is not said is that overriding is done locally, not by changing the particular configuration setting (as I expected it to behave). So, lo and behold, the heavily emphasized note actually does not apply to hooks which do not run an arbitrary Mutt command (which could reset a configuration setting), for example save-hook.

ps. Only about a half of the hooks are actually capable of executing an arbitrary command, which is somewhat contradictory to the definition of the concept of hook in Mutt.