Translated by DeepSeek, original article: link

After trying CLI email clients like [neo]mutt and himalaya, I finally chose aerc as my email client. aerc provides an almost out-of-the-box configuration experience, along with native vim-like keyboard shortcuts, which is perfect for lazy people like me (who don’t want to configure too much). Additionally, aerc supports Maildir, allowing us to fetch emails from mailing lists and use aerc to read and reply to them.

1. Installation

Most Linux distributions provide aerc packages, and we can install it directly using the package manager:

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S aerc

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install aerc

# Fedora
sudo dnf install aerc

# macOS
brew install aerc

2. Configuring Personal Email

By directly running the aerc command and following the prompts, we can complete the most basic email account configuration.

However, since aerc supports Maildir, we can completely use other tools to fetch emails (offlineimap) and send emails (msmtp).

For offlineimap and msmtp configurations, you can refer to ArchWiki:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/OfflineIMAP
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Msmtp

Also, here are my configurations for reference:

$ cat ~/.offlineimaprc
[general]
accounts = pigmoral

[Account pigmoral]
localrepository = pigmoral-local
remoterepository = pigmoral-remote

[Repository pigmoral-local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/Mail/pigmoral

[Repository pigmoral-remote]
type = IMAP
remotehost = imappro.zoho.com
remoteuser = junhui.liu@pigmoral.tech
remotepass = NotShowingYou,HeHe
sslcacertfile = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

$ cat ~/.msmtprc
# Set default values for all following accounts.
defaults
auth           on
tls            on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
logfile        ~/.msmtp.log

# Zoho
account        pigmoral
host           smtppro.zoho.com
port           465
tls_starttls   off
from           junhui.liu@pigmoral.tech
user           junhui.liu@pigmoral.tech
password       NotShowingYou,HeHe

# Set a default account
account default: pigmoral

After configuring offlineimap and msmtp, we can call these two tools in aerc’s configuration:

$ cat ~/.config/aerc/accounts.conf
[Pigmoral]
source = maildir://~/Mail/pigmoral
outgoing = msmtp -a pigmoral
check-mail = 5m
check-mail-timeout = 1m
check-mail-cmd = offlineimap -a pigmoral
default = INBOX
from = Junhui Liu <junhui.liu@pigmoral.tech>
signature-file = ~/.config/aerc/signature.txt

The signature-file contains the default signature when sending emails, which can be modified as needed:

$ cat ~/.config/aerc/signature.txt
Best regards,
Junhui Liu

3. Fetching Mailing Lists

Since aerc supports Maildir, we can configure more than just personal email accounts. We can fetch emails from mailing lists to local storage and then use aerc to browse and reply to them.

To fetch emails from mailing lists, we need to use the lei tool (https://public-inbox.org).

Since I’m mainly involved in RISC-V related development work, I pay attention to the linux-riscv, opensbi, and u-boot mailing lists. Here’s how to configure them:

$ lei q -I https://lore.kernel.org/all/ -o ~/Mail/lore/linux-riscv --dedupe=mid \
      'l:linux-riscv@lists.infradead.org AND rt:1.month.ago..'

$ lei q -I https://lore.kernel.org/all/ -o ~/Mail/lore/opensbi --dedupe=mid \
      'l:opensbi@archiver.kernel.org AND rt:1.month.ago..'

$ lei q -I https://lore.kernel.org/all/ -o ~/Mail/lore/u-boot --dedupe=mid \
      'l:u-boot@lists.denx.de AND rt:1.month.ago..'

The lei q command will match the corresponding emails in lore and fetch them. Later, we only need to use the lei up --all command to update the mailing lists.

Now we can configure aerc to access the fetched emails:

$ cat ~/.config/aerc/accounts.conf
...

[Lore]
source = maildir://~/Mail/lore
outgoing = msmtp -a pigmoral
check-mail = 10m
check-mail-timeout = 1m
check-mail-cmd = lei up --all
default = linux-riscv
from = Junhui Liu <junhui.liu@pigmoral.tech>
signature-file = ~/.config/aerc/signature.txt

4. Getting Started

After completing the configuration according to the previous steps, enter aerc, and if everything goes well, we should see the emails.

Here are some commonly used shortcuts: