aerc is an email client for your terminal.
This is a fork of the original aerc by Drew DeVault.
A short demonstration can be found on https://aerc-mail.org/
Join the IRC channel: #aerc on irc.libera.chat for end-user support, and development.
On its first run, aerc will copy the default config files to ~/.config/aerc
on Linux or ~/Library/Preferences/aerc on MacOS (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aerc if set)
and show the account configuration wizard.
If you redirect stdout to a file, logging output will be written to that file:
$ aerc > log
Note that the default HTML filter additionally needs w3m to be installed
along with optional unshare (from util-linux) or socksify (from
dante-utils).
Also available as man pages:
- aerc(1)
- aerc-accounts(5)
- aerc-binds(5)
- aerc-config(5)
- aerc-imap(5)
- aerc-jmap(5)
- aerc-maildir(5)
- aerc-notmuch(5)
- aerc-patch(7)
- aerc-search(1)
- aerc-sendmail(5)
- aerc-smtp(5)
- aerc-stylesets(7)
- aerc-templates(7)
- aerc-tutorial(7)
User contributions and integration with external tools:
Recent versions of aerc are available on:
And likely other platforms.
Install the dependencies:
- go (>=1.21) (Go versions are supported until their end-of-life; support for older versions may be dropped at any time due to incompatibilities or newer required language features.)
- scdoc
- GNU make
Then compile aerc:
$ gmake
aerc optionally supports notmuch. To enable it, you need to have a recent
version of notmuch, including the header
files (notmuch.h). The notmuch build tag should be automatically added. To
check if it is, run the following command:
$ ./aerc -v
aerc 0.14.0-108-g31e1cd9af565 +notmuch (go1.19.6 amd64 linux)
^^^^^^^^
If it is not, you can force it before building:
$ gmake GOFLAGS=-tags=notmuch
If you have notmuch headers available but do not want to build notmuch support in aerc, force GOFLAGS to an empty value:
$ gmake GOFLAGS=
To install aerc locally:
# gmake install
By default, aerc will install config files to directories under /usr/local/aerc,
and will search for templates and stylesets in these locations in order:
${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/aerc${XDG_DATA_HOME:-~/.local/share}/aerc/usr/local/share/aerc/usr/share/aerc
At build time it is possible to add an extra location to this list and to use
that location as the default install location for config files by setting the
PREFIX option like so:
# gmake PREFIX=/custom/location
# gmake install PREFIX=/custom/location
This will install templates and other config files to /custom/location/share/aerc,
and man pages to /custom/location/share/man. This extra location will have lower
priority than the XDG locations but higher than the fixed paths.
Anyone can contribute to aerc. Please refer to the contribution guidelines
Ask for support or follow general discussions on ~rjarry/[email protected].
Send patches and development related questions to ~rjarry/[email protected].
Instructions for preparing a patch are available at git-send-email.io
Subscribe to release announcements on ~rjarry/[email protected]
Submit confirmed bug reports and confirmed feature requests on https://todo.sr.ht/~rjarry/aerc.