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Try an old, outdated but online and interactive web demo powered by WebAssembly!

• Say hello on #meli on OFTC IRC, or,
• #meli:matrix.org Matrix bridge (if operational)
• 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
  • Cargo Compile-time Features
• Quick start
  • Supported E-mail backends
  • E-mail submission backends
  • Non-exhaustive list of features
  • HTML Rendering
• Documentation

Install

• Crates.io with cargo on all supported systems and architectures https://crates.io/crates/meli

sh cargo install meli Install latest development snapshot from git repository: sh cargo install --git https://git.meli-email.org/meli/meli.git meli - Official Debian (and Debian derivatives) packages https://packages.debian.org/trixie/meli

sh apt install meli - AUR (archlinux) https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/meli

- OpenSUSE https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/openSUSE:Factory/meli

- Alpine Linux https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=meli

sh apk install meli - NetBSD with pkgsrc https://pkgsrc.se/mail/meli

- OpenBSD ports https://openports.pl/path/mail/meli

- macOS with - Homebrew https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/meli

![Homebrew package](https://repology.org/badge/version-for-repo/homebrew/meli.svg)
```sh
brew install meli
```

• MacPorts https://ports.macports.org/port/meli/

  sh port install 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.

See make help output for information on how to use the Makefile.

For detailed building instructions, see BUILD.md

Cargo Compile-time Features

meli supports opting in and out of features at compile time with cargo features.

The contents of the default feature are:

toml default = ["sqlite3", "notmuch", "smtp", "dbus-notifications", "gpgme", "cli-docs", "jmap", "static"]

A list of all the features and a description for each follows:

| Feature flag | Dependencies | Notes | |---------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | notmuch | maildir feature | Provides the notmuch backend | | jmap | http feature, url crate with serde feature | Provides the JMAP backend | | smtp | tls feature | Integrated async SMTP client | | sqlite3 | rusqlite crate with bundled-full feature | Used in caches | | sqlite3-static | rusqlite crate with bundled-full feature | Same as sqlite3 feature but provided for consistency and in case sqlite3 feature stops bundling libsqlite3 statically in the future. | | smtp-trace | smtp feature | Connection trace logs on the trace logging level | | gpgme | | GPG use by dynamically loading libgpgme.so | | tls-static | native-tls crate with vendored feature | Links with OpenSSL statically where it's used | | http-static | isahc crate with static-curl feature | Links with curl statically | | dbus-notifications | notify-rust dependency | Uses DBus notifications | | dbus-static | notify-rust dependency and enableds its d_vendored feature | Includes the dbus library statically. | | cli-docs | flate2 dependency | Includes the manpage documentation compiled by either mandoc or man binary to plain text in meli's command line. Embedded documentation can be viewed with the subcommand meli man [PAGE] | | libz-static | libz-sys dependency and enables its static feature | Allows for the transitive dependency libz (from curl) to be linked statically. | | static | enables tls-static, http-static, sqlite3-static, dbus-static, libz-static features | |

Quick start

```sh

Create configuration file in ${XDGCONFIGHOME}/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.:

sh 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 | full[^0] | | mbox | read-only | | JMAP | functional | | NNTP / Usenet | functional |

[^0]: 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.

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:

sh MELI_CONFIG=./test_config meli

or

sh meli -c ./test_config