meli is a configurable and extensible e-mail client with sane defaults.
It is targeted at both new and power users of the terminal, but built with a modern perspective.
A variety of email workflows and software stacks should be usable with meli. Integrate e-mail storage, sync, tagging system, SMTP client, contact management and editor of your choice to replace the defaults.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Email threads.
- Multithreaded, async operation.
- Mailboxes can be viewed in 4 modes:
- Plain views each mail individually.
- Threaded shows their thread relationship visually.
- Conversations collapses each thread of e-mails into a single entry.
- Compact shows one row per thread.
- Embed your own editor.
- Plain text configuration.
- Multi-tasking with UI tabs.
- IMAP, Maildir, notmuch, JMAP, mbox, and NNTP.
- Optional sqlite3 index search.
- Fast and minimal account configuration.
- Contact list (+read-only vCard support).
- Forced UTF-8 – other encodings are read-only.
- Theming.
- GPG signing, encryption, signing and encryption.
- GPG signature verification.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, BSD, and macOS.
Website: meli-email.org
Support: Code Repository
Developer: Manos Pitsidianakis
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

meli is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials
Related Software
| Console Email Clients | |
|---|---|
| NeoMutt | Brings together many patches to extend Mutt |
| mu4e | An extension of mu that runs a full-featured email client within Emacs |
| Himalaya | CLI email client written in Rust |
| Sup | Curses threads-with tags style email client |
| Mutt | Small but very powerful text based program |
| Alpine | Alternatively Licensed Program for Internet News and Email |
| meli | Configurable and extensible e-mail client with sane defaults |
| nmail | User interface similar to alpine / pine |
| alot | Lets notmuch handle your mailindex and uses a toolkit to render its display |
| Wanderlust | Mail/news management system with IMAP4rev1 support for Emacs |
| aerc | Billed as a "pretty good email client" |
| Cone | COnsole Newsreader And Emailer |
| matcha | Powerful, feature-rich email client for your terminal |
| bower | Curses frontend for the Notmuch email system |
| Vmail | Vim interface to Gmail |
| neatmail | Non-interactive email client |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

