meli

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

Try an old, outdated but online and interactive web demo powered by WebAssembly!

• #meli on OFTC IRC
• Mailing lists
• Main repository https://git.meli-email.org/meli/meli Report bugs and/or feature requests in meli's issue tracker
  Official git mirrors

  • https://codeberg.org/meli/meli
  • https://github.com/meli/meli
  • https://ayllu-forge.org/meli/meli
  • https://gitlab.com/meli-project/meli

Table of contents:

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

Install

• cargo install meli or cargo install --git https://git.meli-email.org/meli/meli.git meli crates.io link
• Official Debian packages https://packages.debian.org/trixie/meli
• AUR (archlinux) https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/meli
• NetBSD with pkgsrc https://pkgsrc.se/mail/meli
• OpenBSD ports https://openports.pl/path/mail/meli
• macOS with MacPorts https://ports.macports.org/port/meli/
• Nix with Nixpkgs https://search.nixos.org/packages?query=meli
• Pre-built debian package, static binaries for amd64, arm64 architectures

Build

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

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
# You can read any manual page with the CLI subcommand `man`:
$ meli man meli.7
# See help output for all options and subcommands.
$ meli --help

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. Examples for configuration file settings can be found in meli.conf.examples(5) 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

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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. ↩︎