Aerc

This material is work-in-progress ... work in progress (Last edited by WhyNotHugo on 7 Jul 2024.)

aerc is a terminal email client (MUA) originally written by ~sircmpwn and now maintained by ~rjarry. It supports multiple accounts, mail synchronisation, GPG integration and more.

Installation

aerc is available in the Community repository.

# apk add aerc

Configuration

Configuration for aerc is stored in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aerc, with $XDG_CONFIG_HOME falling back to ~/.config if it is unset. Settings specific to accounts (e.g. IMAP configuration) are stored in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aerc/accounts.conf which should only be readable and writable by the owning user (permissions 600) as it may store sensitive data like passwords in clear text.

An example account configration using msmtp for sending email and mbsync for fetching email to a local maildirpp store could look like this:

Contents of $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aerc/accounts.conf

[primary] check-mail-cmd = mbsync primary copy-to = Sent from = Full Name <name@example.com> outgoing = msmtp -a primary source = maildirpp://~/mail/primary

The full configuration file format reference can be found in aerc-accounts(5).

Documentation

aerc is extensively documented in its man pages. Consult aerc-tutorial(7) as a starting point.

See also

• aerc source repository
• aerc wiki
• aerc on the ArchWiki