meli

BSD/Linux/macos terminal email client with support for multiple accounts and Maildir / mbox / notmuch / IMAP / JMAP / NNTP (Usenet).

Try an old online interactive web demo powered by WebAssembly!

• #meli on OFTC IRC | mailing lists
• Repository:
  • Main https://git.meli-email.org/meli/meli Report bugs and/or feature requests in meli's issue tracker
  • Official mirror https://codeberg.org/meli/meli
  • Official mirror https://github.com/meli/meli

Table of contents:

• Install
• Build
• Quick start
• Supported E-mail backends
• E-mail submission backends
• Non-exhaustive list of features
• HTML Rendering
• Documentation
• Contribute

Install

• pkgsrc
• openbsd ports
• cargo install meli or cargo install --git https://git.meli-email.org/meli/meli.git meli
• Pre-built debian package, static binaries
• Nix

Build

Run cargo build --release --bin meli or make.

For detailed building instructions, see BUILD.md

Quick start

# Create configuration file in ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/meli/config.toml: $ meli create-config # Edit configuration in ${EDITOR} or ${VISUAL}: $ meli edit-config # Optionally, install manual pages if installed via cargo: $ meli install-man # Ready to go. $ meli

See a comprehensive tour of meli in the manual page meli(7). See also the Quickstart tutorial online. After installing meli, see meli(1), meli.conf(5), meli(7) and meli-themes(5) for documentation. Sample configuration and theme files can be found in the meli/docs/samples/ subdirectory. Manual pages are also hosted online. meli by default looks for a configuration file in this location: ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/meli/config.toml. You can run meli with arbitrary configuration files by setting the ${MELI_CONFIG} environment variable to their locations, i.e.: MELI_CONFIG=./test_config cargo run

See meli(7) for an extensive tutorial and meli.conf(5) for all configuration values.

Main view	Compact main view	Compose with embed terminal editor

Supported E-mail backends

Protocol	Support
IMAP	full
Maildir	full
notmuch	full1
mbox	read-only
JMAP	functional
NNTP / Usenet	functional

E-mail submission backends

• SMTP
• Pipe to shell script
• Server-side submission when supported

Non-exhaustive list of features

• TLS
• email threading support
• multithreaded, async operation
• optionally run your editor of choice inside meli, with an embedded xterm-compatible terminal emulator
• plain text configuration in TOML
• ability to open emails in UI tabs and switch to them
• optional sqlite3 index search
• override almost any setting per mailbox, per account
• contact list (+read-only vCard and mutt alias file support)
• forced UTF-8 (other encodings are read-only)
• configurable shortcuts
• theming
• NO_COLOR support
• ascii-only drawing characters option
• view text/html attachments through an html filter command (w3m by default)
• pipe attachments/mail to stuff
• use external attachment file picker instead of typing in an attachment's full path
• GPG signing, encryption, signing + encryption
• GPG signature verification

HTML Rendering

HTML rendering is achieved using w3m by default. You can use the pager.html_filter setting to override this (for more details you can consult meli.conf(5)).

Documentation

See a comprehensive tour of meli in the manual page meli(7).

See also the Quickstart tutorial online.

After installing meli, see meli(1), meli.conf(5), meli(7) and meli-themes(5) for documentation. Sample configuration and theme files can be found in the meli/docs/samples/ subdirectory. Manual pages are also hosted online.

meli by default looks for a configuration file in this location: ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/meli/config.toml

You can run meli with arbitrary configuration files by setting the ${MELI_CONFIG} environment variable to their locations, or use the [-c, --config] argument:

MELI_CONFIG=./test_config meli

or

meli -c ./test_config

Contribute

For code contributions like merge requests, is the gitea server configured to use various identity providers. No need for extra account creation. But you need to "fork" at the gitea server.

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1. there's no support for searching through all email directly, you'd have to create a mailbox with a notmuch query that returns everything and search inside that mailbox. ↩︎