Text-based email client

Screenshot of Elm

A text-based email client is an email client with its user interface being text-based, occupying a whole terminal screen. Other kind of email clients are GUI-based (cf. email client) or Web-based, see Webmail.

Text-based email clients may be useful for users with visual impairment or partial blindness allowing speech synthesis or text-to-speech software to read content to users. Text-based email clients also allow to manage communication via simple remote sessions, e. g. per SSH, for instance when it is not possible to install a local GUI-client and/or access mail via Web interface. Also users may prefer text-based user interfaces in general.

Typical features include:^[1]

• Editing various emails via tab support
• Configurable rendering of various MIME types, for instance OpenPGP encryption or HTML email
• Vim-style keybindings
• Support for multiple accounts and protocols, e. g. IMAP, Maildir, SMTP, and sendmail
• UTF-8 support

List of text-based email clients

Notable clients include:^[2][3]

• aerc^[4][5][1]
• Cone
• Elm
• Emacs: Gnus, mu4e, rmail, Wanderlust
• Lumail
• mblaze
• meli
• Mutt
  • NeoMutt
• pine
  • alpine
• sup
• vim (using a plugin^[6] for himalaya)

Email software for the command line that does not occupy the whole screen (cf. TUI) include e. g. Cleancode eMail, CURL,^[7] himalaya, mail (Unix), mailx, MH, procmail, sendmail, and many others.

See also

• Text-based web browser
• Comparison of email clients

References

1. "Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal". 2019-06-05.
2. Ravi Saive (2020-02-13). "7 Best Command-Line Email Clients for Linux in 2020". TecMint. sometimes, users prefer to deal with email directly from the command-line
3. "Use plaintext email". 2021-03-19. There are two main types of emails on the internet: plaintext and HTML. The former is strongly preferred, but often isn't set up by default. We'll get you set up right.
4. "aerc 0.1.0". June 3, 2019. Retrieved June 9, 2019.
5. "Contributions to ~sircmpwn/aerc". Archived from the original on 2019-06-08. Retrieved 2021-06-12.
6. "Himalaya/Vim at master · soywod/Himalaya". GitHub.
7. "Reading email - everything curl". everything.curl.dev.