meli mit Homebrew, apk, apt, MacPorts, Nix, zypper installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Repository
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• meli

Projektgeschichte

The project identifies itself as established in 2017 and presents meli as a modern terminal mail user agent with configurability, extensibility, and sane defaults. The official README lists a main self-hosted repository, several official mirrors, mailing lists, IRC and Matrix community channels, and an old WebAssembly demo.

Early public releases used alpha version numbers, with alpha-0.5.0 and alpha-0.5.1 visible in the GitHub mirror release history. The project later moved through 0.8 releases and continues to publish signed tags and release notes for terminal, backend, and dependency fixes.

The codebase is split between the meli binary and melib library, which helps explain the formula description as both a terminal email client and email client library.

Adoptionsgeschichte

meli sits in the long terminal-email tradition alongside mutt, neomutt, aerc, alpine, and notmuch-based workflows. Its README lists installation through cargo, official Debian packages, AUR, openSUSE, Alpine Linux, NetBSD pkgsrc, OpenBSD ports, Homebrew, MacPorts, Nix, and prebuilt Debian/static binaries.

That packaging spread is important because terminal mail users often care about local mail stores, distro integration, GPG, notmuch indexing, and text-editor workflows. meli's support for IMAP, Maildir, notmuch, JMAP, NNTP, SMTP, GPG, themes, and TOML configuration positions it as a newer Rust entrant in a mature niche.

Wie es verwendet wird

The quick start creates a TOML config at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/meli/config.toml with meli create-config, edits it with meli edit-config, then starts the client with meli. The README also documents MELI_CONFIG and -c/--config for arbitrary configuration paths.

meli supports compile-time cargo features for notmuch, JMAP, SMTP, sqlite3 caches, GPG, TLS, HTTP, DBus notifications, embedded CLI docs, and static linking choices.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

meli is significant for package nerds because terminal email clients are unusually sensitive to optional dependencies, crypto libraries, terminal behavior, mail backends, and distro conventions. Its cargo feature matrix makes packaging choices visible and consequential.

Zeitleiste

• 2017: README badge marks the project as established.
• Early alpha era: alpha-0.5.0 and alpha-0.5.1 releases appear in the GitHub mirror release history.
• 2026-01-05: v0.8.13 released with IMAP fixes, mbox viewing support, tab-width configuration, dependency updates, and crash fixes.

Related projects

• melib: the email client library within the meli repository.
• notmuch: one of meli's supported mail backends.
• mutt and neomutt: older terminal mail clients in the same user culture.
• aerc: another modern terminal mail client often compared in the same niche.

Quellen

• https://git.meli-email.org/meli/meli
• https://github.com/meli/meli
• https://github.com/meli/meli/releases/tag/v0.8.13
• https://github.com/meli/meli/releases?page=3
• source_facts.package-manager-url