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
  • Official mirror https://ayllu-forge.org/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

Install

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

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

---

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. ↩︎