7 Best Command-Line Email Clients for Linux in 2020

I recently wrote an article covering the 6 best email clients you can use on the linux desktop, all the email clients on that list where the graphical user interface (gui) programs, but sometimes , users prefer to handle email directly from the command line.

Don’t Miss: 6 Best GUI Email Clients for Linux Systems

For this reason, it is also necessary to highlight some of the best text-based email clients that you can use on your linux system. Although command-line email clients don’t offer exceptional features like their GUI counterparts, they do offer some excellent and powerful message-handling components.

In this review, we will exclusively dive into some of the best command line email clients for linux and the list is as follows. note that all of these email clients below can be installed using default package managers like yum, dnf or apt depending on the distribution of your linux system.

1. mutt – mail user agent

mutt is a small, lightweight but powerful text-based email client for unix-like operating systems. it is feature rich and some of its notable features include:

1. easy to install
2. color support
3. message binding
4. support for imap and pop3 protocols
5. support delivery status
6. supports various mailbox formats like mbox, mh, maildir, mmdf
7. supports pgp/mime (rfc2015)
8. multiple message tagging
9. various components to support the mailing list, including replying to the list
10. full control of message headers during compose
11. the development community active and many more

2. Alpine – Internet News and Email

alpine is a fast, easy-to-use, open source, terminal-based email client for unix-like operating systems, based on the pine messaging system. alpine also runs on windows, it can be integrated with web-based email user agents.

works well for both new users and experts, so it’s easy to use, you can simply learn how to use it through the context sensitive help. furthermore, you can easily customize it via the alpine config command.

some of its features include:

1. supports various protocols, such as imap, pop, smtp, etc.
2. packaged with pico text editor
3. supports on-screen context sensitive help
4. well documented
5. not actively developed and many more

3. sup

sup is a console-based email client that allows users to handle a large number of emails. when you run sup, it returns a list of threads with multiple tags attached, each thread is a hierarchical array of messages.

sup has some nice features and these include:

1. can handle a large amount of email
2. supports quick search of full text messages
3. supports automatic management of contact lists
4. manages email from various sources, including mbox and maildir
5. search the entire email store easily
6. supports gpg for privacy functionality
7. supports managing multiple email accounts

4. Notmuch

“notmuch mail” is a fast, powerful, globally searchable, tag-based email system that you can use in your text editors or linux terminals. its development was heavily influenced by sup, and it offers performance improvements to several sup features.

It’s not a great email client, so it doesn’t receive emails or send messages, but simply allows users to quickly search through a collection of emails. you can think of it as a library interface to extend an email program for fast, global, tag-based email search functionality.

notmuch has the following notable features:

1. does not support imap or pop3 protocols
2. no mail composer
3. supports tags and quick search
4. no user interface
5. uses xapian for its main task, so “not much”
6. supports various command line utilities, email clients and wrappers for emacs, vim text editors
7. also supports mutt script integration

5. Mu4e

mu4e is an emacs-based email client that allows users to handle emails (such as searching, reading, replying, moving, deleting) very efficiently. The basic idea is to set up an offline imap client that allows you to sync your local computer with a remote email server.

features:

• Fully search based with no folders, just queries.
• Simple documentation with example configurations.
• UI designed for speed, with fast keystrokes for common actions.
• support for signing and encryption.
• address autocompletion based on your existing messages.
• extendable with available snippets or with your own code.

6. Lumail

lumail is a console based email client developed especially for gnu/linux with fully integrated scripting and support operations on local maildir hierarchies and remote imap mail servers.

There are many graphical based email clients for linux, but comparatively, lumail is designed for command line use only with built-in support for real language scripting.

7. Aerc

aerc is recommended as one of the best email clients to run on your terminal. is free and open source software that is very powerful and extensible and is perfect for the most demanding hackers.

The above-listed command-line or terminal or text-based email clients are the best you can use on your Linux system, but many times, you can only find out good features and performance attributes of an application after testing it.

so you can try them all and choose which one to use, in case you’re a command line junkie, who doesn’t use guis as much. More importantly, you can also let us know about any other command line email clients you think deserve to be listed above, via the comments section below.